The Throne, 2015 Korean film about Sado

[ajk]

OK I'm finally getting caught up on things in my life and will get back on track here. Starting with watching The Throne!

I watched the first half-hour or so of this a while back and was very impressed.  And especially after watching KOTW am interested to see how this compares (as much as you can compare a movie to a series). It's available through several places online--Viki, Amazon Prime, Netflix--and this one on Tubi:

tubitv.com/movies/581021/the-throne

I don't know enough about which of these are better than others, but Tubi is free so I'm going to try it first. This will be the "episode" viewing here for the week and I'll post my two cents next weekend.

And then after that we'll get started on My Dearest and then Mr. Sunshine.

[ajk]

Finally finished watching it. Actually it’s a good thing that I didn’t finish it originally, because it helped a great deal to watch KOTW first and learn about the lesser characters in the story. This movie assumes that you already know who everyone is. No one is introduced or explained.

But anyway yes it’s everything that everyone said it was. Visually it looked good, the acting was excellent, and the music was restrained and kept in the background and was effective. The actors playing Sado and Youngjo were both good choices. And the queen mother was particularly good among the supporting characters—she had that one scene with Youngjo and gave him that Oh-you’re-going-to-try-to-sass-me? attitude and it was perfect. And it was fun to see so many new non-TV faces. Really gave the feeling of telling a fresh story.

And the casting choices overall—almost no one in the cast was that sort of telegenically attractive type that we’re used to seeing in TV historicals. They looked much more like a group of real people and it made the story more powerful. Great decision by the producers.

The way the story was constructed and written was creative and interesting. I liked how they wove the seven days in the chest with flashbacks to earlier events in Sado’s life. This particular story about Sado’s mental health, it felt sort of thinned out by trying to stretch it across dozens of TV episodes and I think the movie showed that it’s told more effectively in a shorter time.

I wish we had seen more of Sado’s childhood in those flashbacks, because the kind of anxiety disorder Sado obviously suffered from, it’s set up in early childhood and it would have made the story more complete to address that more thoroughly. But the other side of doing that is you have to fictionalize more to be able to show examples, as opposed to showing so many scenes and events from later years that are known to be historically true. So I can’t fault them for it, especially since it’s just a single two-hour movie and you can only show so much.

But what they did show of Sado’s childhood was very good. The little kid being force-fed all of that advanced literature, no wonder he never had any enthusiasm for the stuff. And there was one glimpse of him going to bed at night and we can see he’s sucking his thumb, and he’s way too old to be doing that. But as a coping mechanism it makes perfect sense, so give credit there, well done.

I didn’t really understand the ending—with the young new king trying to make his mom laugh and using that particular fan in his hand to help do it. Maybe there were subtleties that were lost to me as a non-Korean…but I guess it was a nice way to show Lady Hyegyeong have a moment of happiness after so much stress and misery throughout her life. The scene right before that, at Sado’s grave, was a real highlight, with the king pouring water on the burial mound, that was terrific. I liked that they didn’t end the story with Sado’s death but went on and showed the impact that it all had on the son.

There was only one thing in the whole movie that I didn’t like. Near the end, on day 7, Youngjo and Sado had that telepathic “conversation” and we listened to them talking everything through like calm, mature adults. That scene was a mistake. They never did communicate well in real life; in fact that was one of my reactions to learning this story, how sad it was that so many of their problems could have been resolved if they had been able to talk more comfortably and frankly with each other. And what they “said” in that scene, it was all stuff we knew and we didn’t need to hear it. So yeah that scene would have been better left on the cutting room floor.

But it’s an excellent movie and it very much had the feeling of trying to be historically accurate. Plenty of historical things that I learned from KOTW (and a few things that weren’t in KOTW) and none of the sillier fictional things. Huge credit to everybody involved in making it.

[sageuk]

Love this track.

It really captures his madness.

[truth]

One thing I didn't like from the movie was Sado's Afghan Hound.

I'm pretty sure owning an Afghan Hound was not a thing during Joseon dynasty.

The director said the decision was made based on picture of a dog painted by Sado himself, but I doubt that dog is an Afghan Hound. It's probably an old Korean breed that is now extinct.





Sado's dog paintings








My favorite scene of this film. Still gives me goosebumps everytime I watch it.

[𝔰𝔢𝔞𝔫𝔪𝔞𝔠𝔩𝔞𝔦𝔯]

May 10, 2024 8:40:59 GMT -5 truth said:

My favorite scene of this film. Still gives me goosebumps everytime I watch it.

I didn't know what song this was when I first listened to it, but now I know it's the Song of Lament (회심곡), a Buddhist morality gasa-type poem that can apparently stretch to half an hour based on this version:

one of MBC's first historical adaptations was a novel based on this song, although it's totally lost, being a 1969 drama.

[ajk]

Yeah that's an excellent scene--and it really shows how much of a difference music can make. There's not a lot of music in the film for the most part, which only makes that song stand out more and sound more rebellious and wilder.

[ajk]

One thing I forgot to mention--when I watched the end credits I was very surprised to see that the soundtrack was performed by the Prague Philharmonic and not a Korean orchestra. I think the Prague orchestra has done some prominent film work for other things...but still, would not have expected them to go so far away for the music.