Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils (2021)

Not Satisfied

If your looking for a wuxia drama, I would not bother watching. My first dislike is that this drama has an old feel to it, which for some people is a plus but it dosen't work for this re make.

Storyline: Its not exactly spectacular - Duan yu, Qiao feng, Xu Zhu don't really cross paths and the reason they are sworn brothers happens because they bump into each other. Another problem is that the story in general dosen't leave you excited for the next episode - I find that sometimes I just watch the episode for the sake of watching it. There's no intense suspense as all. Duan Yu also basically has like no skills in this version as well. The fights are average, the CGI was a little weird with the tibet monk guy and it seemed like there was no modern cgi at all. The romance is not there at all, so if your looking for romance, yeah there's none at all. Im not a big romance fan, but it seemed like Duan Yu didn't have chemistry with lady wang at all. The ending of the story was lackluster and had nothing to it.

The acting is decent, but the storyline ruins the show in general. Would not watch again. If you thought that the novel could be bought to life, wait for the next re make. I usually don't leave negative reviews but this one was so bad that I had to.

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Mediocre. Nothing stands out.

My insignificant 2 cents

Pros: beautiful landscapes, quite faithful to novel contents, acceptable use of CGI

Cons: Xu Zhu and fight with MRF appear too early, uncompelling plot, bad casting, mediocre choreography, lack chemistry between the casts, unflattering film texture(esp the filter), bad costume designs and some that I might missed.

In short, it is a mediocre adaptation that nothing stands out except getting attention for it's abysmal casting and depiction of the characters. Certain characters are tainted with unnecessary rendition(i.e.*cough*Duan Yu's urine.... *cough*). Although I don't enjoy this as much, in my POV it's not that flopped to get 3.5/10 in douban rating, but it's also not a good enough adaptation to stand up to such a big, big IP. If I were to recommend classic wuxia in the past 5 years, there are better works from Jin Yong IPs such as LOCH2017, HSDS2019 and for Gu Long IP HS2020.

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