aibafiles - Tumblr blog

aibafiles · 10 days ago

Text

i actually cannot stop marinating on this movie so here's a more detailed breakdown of my thoughts on it under the cut + an elaboration of stuff i said in the tags:

(cw for some themes present in the original novel)

first off, some stuff i genuinely liked:

jung heewon hype moments and aura

also when she was like "the scenario's not over. there's one more monster" and went back to kill cheon inho. it would have been even cooler if he weren't a literal monster though

despite myself i genuinely found bihyung in this movie kind of cute. watching this little fuckass labubu fly around on my screen was actually pretty charming. i love the marble sounds his insides make. i would have vastly preferred furry creature bihyung but honestly he was by far the most entertaining part of this movie so i'm not complaining. biryu was ugly though

that sort of wireframe effect when items spawn in (like yjh's swords) was pretty sick

as much as i've seen people dunk on jisoo's performance as ljh, i thought her emotional moments were well done. having her snipe the last green zone was a cool moment, as silly as the trickshot was.

anyway. i've been trying to reserve judgement on this movie for a long time. i saw fans writing it off as soon as the teaser with the guns dropped, and i was like "eh, there are worse choices you can make, this isn't a fundamental betrayal of the emotional core of the story on its own." and then, well. news kept coming out. i'm always open to enjoying adaptations for what they are and looking at the changes they make, but orv had me very nervous about where they were going with it.

so, broadly speaking, this movie has removed or streamlined most of the meta elements (dokja's skills, constellations, and the detail with which dokja predicts the future). from an adaptational perspective, a lot of this makes sense - you don't want your action movie to be bogged down with constant exposition, sponsor popup messages, skill explanations, etc., and this movie is already trying SO hard to fit everything in its two hour runtime. constellations are nebulous, rarely discussed figures that donate money and grant power, dokja narrates about key details when it's relevant and leaves plenty of his actions unexplained, and his skills...well, they don't exist.

(at one point, dokja literally tells bihyung to turn off sponsor messages because he's getting too many, so they have an excuse not to include them. also why did SO many of them want to sponsor him at the beginning?? he just scrolls past a massive list with no explanation and hits "none of the above" and never explains why this is important. he doesn't bring it up in the contract scene either. i guess constellations are so baked into the story of orv that you can't truly remove them, but it must be confusing as hell for new viewers. let's move on.)

removing the meta elements also means that the scenarios are streamlined into action-focused sequences that lose a lot of what made them engaging in the first place. we don't get to see dokja taking full advantage of the systems to win fights. it's just Number Go Up and Cool Sword. deus ex machina is just a normal bridge sangah made with her powers. the fire dragon fight, probably the sequence that first truly hooked me on orv because of dokja's clever solution to it (and king of no killing), is now the climax of this film, but it just feels like a generic Summer Action Blockbuster Finale. whatever, man.

some other broad aspects have been changed in service of the themes: this movie wants to tell a story about human nature and the power of supporting each other. or something. dokja is massively rewritten in service of this - in dokja's opening monologue, we learn how disappointed he was by the ending of TWSA, going so far as to tell tls123 how awful it was. he hated to see a protagonist who survived all alone, discarding everyone around him. the scenarios begin after tls123 effectively goes "oh yeah? write your own ending then."

THIS is the fundamental betrayal of the emotional core i was so worried about. orv is a story about the love between reader, writer, and protagonist. dokja perseveres to the end because he wants to see the ending of a story he loves so much. now he's motivated by spite toward that same story. it feels so much more cynical - but at the same time they've sanded the edges off him.

this dokja is not selfishly looking out for his own. he tries to play the hero in the early scenarios, saving as many people as he can on the train. gilyoung has an ant farm this time, so there's lots to go around - dokja even offers one to namwoon! i think they want him to read as much more sympathetic here, even giving him a moment of trying desperately to save the old woman. (and yet they cut him making sure gilyoung had a bug??) the train scenario ends with 17 survivors instead of 5. because dokja is such a hero. yayyyyy

in the second scenario, dokja doesn't withhold coins from the minor group. cheon inho effectively frames him, telling the minor group he's been hogging coins from hunting and won't share. his refusal to share in the original is such an interesting moment when he could be leaving people to die. but they don't want you to dislike him here, so he first offers to share his coins, before going "actually we'll kill the monsters for you instead." when we learn later that the people of geumho station died offscreen, dokja's hands are completely clean.

despite all this, the third scenario now becomes about teaching him to get over his selfish desire for self-preservation. (??????????) when dokja and friends arrive in chungmuro, he panics about the monster attack and locates a hidden 1-person green zone on the train platform that he knows about from TWSA. the rest of his squad looks at him in dismay for abandoning the rest of them to their fate. at this point, i assumed they must be cutting the hidden green zones on the wall...but then they play that sequence entirely straight, down to dokja giving gilyoung the last spot and eating the Rock That Makes You A Ghost For A While. (it is not explained to the audience why he does this.)

so while dokja is in mind trauma prison (no fourth wall, i'll get to that), his allies whose safety he ensured...leave their green zone and fight off the monsters together. dokja eventually wakes up and realizes his friends fought all night for him, realizing the power of teamwork. hasn't he been trying to maximize everyone's survival throughout the other scenarios in this film? why would the guy whose first solution to any problem in the novel is "what if i killed myself" need this lesson? and shouldn't he already know from TWSA that teamwork is the only way to overcome this scenario? it's so bizarre. this movie can't decide if dokja is a selfless hero or just trying to save his own skin (the answer should be neither), nor can it decide if he's a cool and collected genius who knows how to handle situations with his future knowledge or a nervous wreck who flounders in yjh's presence and only remembers key details when someone reminds him.

my other big issue with dokja's characterization is his new backstory. we see snippets of it early on, but we get the full picture when he's in the illusory prison: dokja and another classmate were both bullied at school, and one day forced to fight each other on film - the bullies would treat the loser as a doormat. dokja beats up his classmate, and we later hear that he died. he blames himself for the death, and he sees himself in yjh at the end of TWSA, who discards other people to get by. his own guilt is the reason he hates the ending of the novel, and the reason he fights for a better ending where others can survive.

it's almost compelling in the context of the movie, and ties into the broader statements about human nature that it wants to make, but why do this with orv in the first place? he already had a perfectly workable backstory about how his family trauma was commodified and put on display - hell, the bullies in this flashback even FILM them and they don't draw a single parallel to the constellations! his character arc in this movie is confusing at best, and i'm baffled at this orv adaptation that doesn't want to touch on its protagonist's lifelong relationship with the good and bad of storytelling. it's been discarded in favor of a generic Teamwork Good message. you had orv and you took out all the parts that made it orv and turned it into fighting monsters with the power of friendship.

miscellaneous nonsense:

the plot has to be incredibly streamlined, so the main conflict is that yjh is going to die fighting the fire dragon at the end of the third scenario if he goes it alone. it's the fire dragon fight with the stakes of the theater dungeon and none of the intrigue. it just feels like a pointless action sequence tacked on to some mildly interesting third scenario stuff. dokja also explains that if yjh dies, the universe will cease to exist. he does in fact briefly die and everyone starts disintegrating. there's an announcement message about it. dokja brings him back, somehow, by earning king of no killing, which is a scenario reward for defeating the dragon, for some reason. why did they do this.

also after the first night in chungmuro they make the scenario harder and eliminate green zones "because everyone worked together and the constellations are mad." what?

all the characterization for the rest of the cast is paper-thin. i saw a lot of griping online about sangah being a healer, but she's not really, she just uses her threads (webs? they don't actually establish what her power is so she just looks like spiderman.) to wrap a wound. that said, she gets absolutely nothing interesting to do and is constantly trying to leave the situation when things get too scary. she doesn't get to apply her skills in creative ways. she doesn't even get her promotion

absolutely no mention of sexual assault in heewon's backstory. i know it was toned down for the ebook but it feels like such a disservice to her character. she gets a lot of badass action moments but that's really about it. also time of judgement is just a gold aura around her weapons and not like. hellfire. come on man

gilyoung is even younger than his novel counterpart. he's there to control bugs and be the child everyone wants to protect. that's about it

hyunsung is hard to fuck up, honestly. he's fine? they simplified his backstory and it's serviceable for what it is. but he's not interesting

joonghyuk is like barely in this movie. i honestly felt like he was the most faithful to the original for a good portion of it, but again they barely give him anything to do. why does he show up in dokja's illusory prison mindscape to give him a pep talk. whatever

the guns were fine. genuinely the guns were fine. we see yjh use them a bit in a flashback from a previous loop, but he's swords all the way down in the present. jihye's sniper rifle is so far down the list of bullshit this movie does i can't even get mad about it

the bridge scene is so sauceless. there's no pretense for kdj and yjh to work together at this point because there's no even bridge stipulation, so the whole scene is dokja desperately pleading to be spared so they can survive the dragon later. no "let go of me already," no "you really are a prophet." where is his confidence. why does he suddenly get it in the next scene when he's persuading bihyung to make a contract

dokja gets the power to restore broken faith and defeat the fire dragon...thanks to tls123, moved by his determination to reach a different ending. honestly, i thought it was a pretty cool moment if we're looking at the adaptation on its own terms. as far as orv goes, it makes absolutely no sense, but we've already thrown so much of orv out the window that if i'm going to enjoy this movie on its own terms, then sure. it works in that context. why not

the pacing of this movie is atrocious. SO much shit just happens with zero setup. there's no time to breathe or explain. they go hunting ground rats and end up in the illusory prison and you're like okay? i guess we're doing the trauma tunnel now? dokja takes an ice pill in the dragon fight. they never tell you what this or why he does it. i thought it was funny when sangah makes the bridge out of nowhere and then gets confused about her own power

why did they make the dragon like that

in conclusion: He Would Not Fucking Say That

just watched the orv live action. i think they forgot to put orv in it

#orv #personal

19 notes · View notes