Memories of the Alhambra (2019)
Review of Memories of the Alhambra / 알함브라 궁전의 추억 (2019)
I really don’t know what took me so long to watch this drama. Perhaps it’s my friend’s hatred of Park Chan-yeol rubbing off of me, but when this came out I remember the massive hype surrounding it. I’ve been on such a K-drama kick as of late, so when I saw this in my suggested, I pressed play.
I think I was intrigued by the lead couple being played by Park Shin-hye and Hyun-bin. And oh my god I wondered how I missed this drama, because this was one hell of a ride to get through.
I really didn’t know what this drama was about when I pressed play, but if I were to describe it now, it’s the mixing of a violent video game world with reality. It’s a bit cautious considering the real state of our world, how we manage to blur the lines between reality and fiction, as well as one’s addiction to video games.
But my absolute favorite part of this drama was the setting in Spain. It was absolutely beautiful, and if we could’ve set the entire show in Grenada I would not have been mad.
Let’s dive into this review!
Content
The story of this drama kickstarts when CEO of a tech lens company, Yoo Jin-woo (played by Hyun-bin), gets a call from youth game developer Jung Se-joo (Park Chan-yeol).
Se-joo is frantic on the phone, telling Jin-woo he needs to come to Spain to meet him, and so Jin-woo ventures to Grenada, Spain, at a small Korean hostel on the side streets owned by Se-joo’s sister Hee-joo.
This hostel is rather small and not up to our rich CEO’s standards, but it is how Hee-joo manages to make money for her family. They moved to Spain because they thought she was a guitar prodigy, but after her father and mother died, Hee-joo abandoned that dream to provide for her grandmother, brother, and sister.
Jin-woo begins obsessively playing the game that Se-joo developed—it’s conducted via the contact lens his company creates, and it takes place in the real world.
Only those playing the game with the contact lens in can see the monsters and people attacking, so, to the average passerby, the person playing looks absolutely insane.
Jin-woo needs to buy the game, but Se-joo is now missing, so he develops a plan in order to buy it from his sister, who is his legal guardian.
This is where the plot quickly begins to get tricky, because Jin-woo’s rival dies after dueling with him in the game, and is now literally hunting him as an NPC.
It’s absolutely insane the presence this character takes as an NPC, because he’s almost in every single episode.
While alive, he only stole Jin-woo’s wife from him (they cheated), but after his death and rebirth as the NPC, he is a glaring figure, one who does not speak, only glares and hacks with his sword. He’s quite the formidable and intimidating figure.
I will be honest though, once we got into the Seoul portion of the drama, I found myself caring less and less about the plot. It seemed to hold more mystery to me in the Spain portion, where the land held this mysterious aura and was absolutely foreign and ancient.
The main focus of the plot then solely goes into being figuring out what happened to Se-joo and why the two worlds are merging for the players, as well as spiraling quickly into a crime genre show because the cops are starting to get involved.
There are some major twists in this I never saw coming and got me gasping, so I appreciated the risks they took in choosing death and life among characters.
I did wonder, however, what exactly Park Shin-hye’s character’s purpose was. I would’ve been absolutely chill with a drama about a woman running a boarding house in Spain and learning to love a rich CEO who gave her millions of dollars to live off of for the rest of her life.
I wouldn’t have been mad about that. But besides her playing the role of Emma in the drama, who is a major key created by Se-joo for the circumstances of his disappearance, her real life alter ego doesn’t really do much.
I get that our male lead is traumatized by the shitty people he invited into his life and how PSH’s character heals that (he learns to trust again), but she literally serves no purpose in the drama. It could’ve been so badass to see a woman in the game (we literally only see men playing the game) working alongside him to shoot up the enemies.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a solid drama, but I know a lot of people got pissed towards the second half of it.
Supposedly there is going to be a season 2, which would make sense considering the ending, but I genuinely wasn’t mad at the ending. I just think there were quite a bit of missed opportunities scattered throughout the drama, and I wanted more Spain from it.
The female lead just kind of exists as mediocre emotional support who cares and loves for the male lead, which is disappointing to see because women can game too. Drop the love story, focus on the action, and this could’ve been a great drama.
