2 out of 5

Created by: Jinnie Choi

An augmented reality game, accessed via special lenses, that is so immersive that it seemingly has the ability to kill its users.  The bratty, billionaire investor who travels to Granada to woo the working class sister of the absent game designer into signing over the rights, setting up meet cute possibilities galore.  Such are the two storylines being mashed up into Memories of the Alhambra, as Yoo Jin-woo (Hyun Bin) frets his way through this pesky murderous game bug while gifting Jung Hee-joo (Park Shin-hye) for a big ol’ check to buy her brother’s game and negging his way into her heart.

…And there’s the rub.  Or, at least, one of them.  There are some huge, unfortunate leaps in logic regarding the AR game, but we’ll excuse some fictional license there, and admit that Memories leans more into romantic drama territory, despite having several actiony gamey sequences; what’s tougher to excuse are the ridiculously obvious runarounds included just for forced drama – I dropped my phone, just so you can’t contact me for the next two scenes!; all of a sudden, there’s a thirty minute delay on in-game reloading, so I’m in trouble for just this scene!; and more.  This is doubled- and tripled-down on as things go on, with the bits that are interesting pushed further and further out by a continual series of ‘realization’ flashbacks that fully repeat scenes we just saw a few minutes ago.

This stuff is annoying, but wouldn’t necessarily be a complete deal breaker, as the core concept of Yoo Jin-woo trying to redeem his bratty ways by fixing the game – and it goes deeper than that, tying some further reasons for his quest into Jung Hee-joo’s family, and protecting his own friends and extended family – is generally entertaining, with some cool (if, again, ridiculous) twists building up to some killer can’t-wait-to-watch-the-next-episode cliffhangers.  The effects are kinda limited to how they make the in-game weapons appear and disappear, but it’s pretty cool, and some of the lighter moments between Jin-woo and his secretary (Min Jin-woong) and employee (Jo Hyun-chul) are fun.

And then there’s the romance.  Our leads are each wonderfully attractive, and charming as their swarmy princely type and besotted but whip-smart would-be princess type, and we recognize and can swoon at all the meet-cute steps building up to eventual lovey-dovey eyes.  Except… we sort of skip any legitimate reason for that to occur.  Yoo Jin-woo is a complete bastard to Jung Hee-joo throughout; he’s of interest to her because he’s the slightly mysterious, handsome, bad-boy rich dude, but she jumps full in when he takes a fall and she gets the chance to mother him.  There’s no real reason for this, it just plays into a type of danger-brings-us-together stereotype, which is also a trope in these things, but the writers forget to clue Yoo Jin-woo in, as he’s still an utter bastard.  Only now, instead of criticizing Jung Hee-joo for being poor or lacking confidence with a sneer, he does so with a smile.  He gives her gifts of jewelry, which she wears out to a dinner invite, only for him to tell her that she looks better without them.  He withholds information so she waits by the phone for his call, and never apologizes.  He asks her to “prove” that she trusts him by swooping in for a kiss.  Yes, sure, within the context of the scene it’s welcomed, but this is pretty dark behavior.  If the show wasn’t completely romanticizing this nonsense, you could pretend there’s some meta-ness about how this fits in to a stereotypical gamergate type female persecution and pursuance, but… yeah, that’s not what’s going on here.  Nope: it’s just Yoo Jin-woo calling Jung Hee-joo dumb and silly, then she swoons, and weeps when he doesn’t call.  Fabulous.  This is all without touching on his two ex-wives, also characters in the show…

The bits and pieces of Memories of Alhambra are enjoyable.  At a very, very surface level, it can be pretty fun, until it starts to tumble down into backtracked logic to explain its hastily-thought out concept, and pursues its shallowly derived relationship with rather detestable behaviors, propping Yoo Jin-woo up as the show’s desirable hero because he likes acting like a dick and making stupid decisions.

All I wanted was for Yoo Jin-woo to apologize, once.  Spoiler: that doesn’t happen.