Review of My Love From the Star / 별에서 온 그대

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In 2024, I’ve been on a roll with my blog. I did take two months off in the summer to go to Busan, South Korea, on a fully funded scholarship, but besides that I’ve been focusing hardcore on my blog and what it can achieve. I’ve built such a nice community on here, and I’ve been loving what it and the people around me have to offer in terms of perspective.

Korean dramas have been a passion of mine ever since 2013, which is when I watched The Heirs for the first time. Ever since then I've watched so many Korean dramas, and I’ve even studied abroad and lived in South Korea twice now in Seoul/Anyang and Busan. I even did my master’s thesis on Korean women’s literature.

That’s why I’m starting a new series on the blog where I revisit all of my old Korean drama watches and review them. I had a lot of these half-written already, but I needed to edit them from whenever I watched them originally and make them a bit more modern and up to date.

My Love From the Star is the second entry to this little series, so I hope you enjoy reading through my thoughts on this show! It really is a classic.

Let’s get into the review. I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction!

A disgraced celebrity falls in love with a man who’s actually an alien from another planet.

So in this series, neither of our leads are normal, everyday people. You can kind of see that immediately from the way they live. Most Korean drama houses aren’t normal people houses, but these two especially live in some of the nicest spaces you can live in within Seoul. This makes sense once you watch the show.

Our male lead is Do Min-joon, an alien who arrived to Earth during the Joseon Dynasty. He’s now been on the planet for over four hundred years now, as he accidentally missed his spaceship back home when he rescued a girl from falling off of a cliff. His good deed screwed him over though, as he can’t go back until the 2010s.

But because he’s an alien, he doesn’t age, and he looks perfect. He’s better than the average human in terms of physicality as well, and now works as a college professor after pursuing other careers throughout the years.

Things are about to change for him completely when he runs into Hallyu actress Cheon Song-yi. She’s been famous for many years now, but her attitude has garnered her enemies in the industry.

She also has family and friend issues, as her mother is messing up her finances with her spending and her best childhood friend is in love with the guy who loves Song-yi, leading to some resentment.

Song-yi and Min-joon meet when she moves into the condo right next to his. And because her life is a mess, she sucks him into her adventures, even though he plans on leaving the planet in three months when the next spaceship out of there is available.

Once she realizes he has legal knowledge though, having worked as a lawyer as one of his many jobs, she asks him to become her manager. Although he tries to keep avoiding her up until this point, afraid of creating emotional ties to the planet, he agrees to all of this. It doesn’t help that her career is down the drain due to rumors.

Things get even more complicated as one of those rumors is that she is the cause of her rival’s suicide. When Song-yi starts poking around and discovers something she shouldn’t have, it puts her in danger.

Good thing Min-joon is around. And the more these two spend time together, the more romantic feelings are going to develop. That’s going to lead to some hard decisions when Min-joon’s departure date approaches.

Overall Thoughts

This is considered to be one of the best Korean dramas to have released, and I think I kind of agree with that sentiment. Sure the characters aren’t rooted in reality and it’s not exactly a reflection of real world issues (although I could make an argument about Song-yi’s career and female celebrity being woven in controversy—gender studies is always applicable in these scenarios), but it’s entertaining.

And when it came out in 2013, it felt new and fresh. I remember when this show released, and I watched it early on. Now, over a decade later, I think it still is pretty entertaining. There are some contemporary Korean dramas I would rank below this series.

All of this is to say that if you haven’t watched the show in its entirety yet, go and do so. It’s what helped skyrocket both of their careers to new levels, and it’s a classic. It’s got drama, sweetness, and a dash of anger packaged into one show. What more could you want?

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