Short: Cast are all awesome, characters are interesting, story is clever but will twist your brain a bit particularly in the latter parts. Music is good but nothing stand-out. Action is fantastic and over the top, there are some really good scenes, but, the bad guys are stormtroopers, as usual. Scenes of a wasteland future were stunning. Ending killed it for me though, made no sense.

Detail:
This is a time travel story, which means you have to expect your brain is going to get a bit twisted, but the easiest way you can prepare yourself to understand how things progress is to remember cause and effect - that is the natural order of things, a leads to b, b leads to c. If you change b, then c will be different.

There are many ideas of how time works in the universe, the most common one depicted (and is so here) is that it is a single string, a leads to b, b leads to c, as i outlined above. If you go back in time 10 minutes and meet yourself, put a flower in the other "you's" lapel, that flower is in your lapel too, and was always there. So - Sisyphus is following this direction for time travel.

For the most part it's a sound story, it's got tons of action and much of it is way over the top, which is fine, if you're going to have action you might as well make it appeal to action fans :) This is james bond (1 shot kills instantly) versus the storm troopers (can't hit an elephant in a tunnel with a full load of ammo) type action. It didn't detract, it's kinda how I expect things to go these days :)

The romance between Seo Hae and Tae Sul was ok, there was nothing too burning hot between them but then they're also fighting for their lives and dealing with mind bending situations - so you gotta allow some slack on that front i think.

Kim Byung Chul plays the bad guy really well, utterly psycho, he's a great actor though one I always regret seeing if only because he's going to nail the bad guy every time and make me hate his character :) He toys with the main leads mercilessly and the unhinged expressions and whole body language throughout are brilliant.

However, what matters more so than anything in a story like this is the ending - because you can create all kinds of mess and sticky situations, you can twist the world upside down and look as clever as you like - but if you can't end it properly, then it rather undermines the weight of what came before. This story, in my opinion, failed heartily on that front.

I've read some posts and FAQ's posted by people who are more satisfied with the ending but... I feel they've written their own stories to explain it rather than basing it on specifically what we are told in the story itself. The story progresses to a point very near the end, and then just shows a couple of clips without any context or explanation and leaves it up to interpretation to figure out what is meant by them. So... again, based on what we're *told* in the story, rather than making up new story to try and explain the unexplained, I feel the ending was very poor.

In many ways this is fundamentally a tragedy type of a story - because they're from different times, the main leads either solve the time loop paradox and can never be together, or they stay together but Korea remains destroyed and the time loop persists. I think they could have actually played to that as a strength more, and possibly it is indeed what they were trying to express, but they blew it - in my probably flawed opinion of course.

It's worth a watch for the action, it's worth a watch for the cast, but expect things to make you go "wait, what?" and just pat yourself on the head and say "its ok, just... ignore it and enjoy everything else". :)

So close to being one of the greats, I think.