Hi,
you're watching AvenueX where a junkie on good storytelling
shares her thoughts, knowledge and occasional weird ideas
knowledge and occasional weird ideas or stories and how they're told.
Wisher,
Zhi Ming Yuan Wang is a 12 episodes web drama that has just started airing
on the platform iqiyi as its second drama of 2021.
Light On
Mi Mu Ju Chang
my long time viewer probably know
this drama should have come out last years summer.
The drama is led by Feng Shaofeng, Wen Qi
Fan Chengcheng, Guo Zifan, also featuring Shao Bing and Yang Rong
I have watched the first 6 episodes,
which is the first week's release of this drama
halfway point.
You can call this a first impression or halfway review.
Based on the first 6 episodes i've watched,
i'll give it a one goldmine
I'll first let you know what the story is roughly about and then the good and bad.
why I give it such a rating
Wisher is a story set in near future.
unspecific about the exact time.
The title of the drama wisher is also the name
of an app on your mobile device in this drama.
It will just suddenly show up on your phone,
and you cannot delete it.
You can make a wish to it,
whatever the wish is.
And it will give you in return a task for you to complete.
It could be as random as get to a location
at a particular time and meet a person.
Once you complete it
you will get your wish fulfilled.
As we all know, there's no free lunch really in this world,
and soon they will find out there's a bigger price to pay.
And there is an organization creating this app and what it's trying to do.
And it's not hard to see with this kind of set up immediately.
It's talking about butterfly effect.
It will literally slap it on your face from the
title sequence to the lines of the characters speaking
first
starting from smaller points.
On the positive end of things,
this is a very designed drama from its color grading
camera language, sets that's picked, angle of camera.
Everything gives you a very strong sense that the creative team
behind it has a very clear style and look and vibe they are going for
I'd say that's better than randomly set up cameras
and just film things and not design lighting,
not design color,
not design anything that shows up which happens
to so many very unprofessional projects in china.
So this is definitely a plus
second thing,
not really positive,
but the moment this drama started,
i'm like holy moly,
it's in Chongqing again,
so they've shot the drama in my hometown, again
Somehow chinese dramaland in recent couple of years has just
unanimously decided chongqing is gonna be the crime city.
I've said this to many times i'm tired of it,
but there's one cool thing though about doing that in chongqing.
That is different from previous dramas that were shot in chongqing
is they mainly shot it on campus of Sichuan Fine Art institute.
Most specifically its new campus.
This is a well established university in chongqing.
And it had an old campus historically.
I think it was in the last 10 years can't remember which year,
but rather close to today,
they built a new campus that is at the edge of the city.
They filmed most of these schools.
If you see the universities crazy architecture.
the ladders, the wall facade
the insanity looking gallery,
millions and millions of mosaic colorful tiles on the outside of the building.
And it's all filmed at that location.
One of my favorite place of my city,
I highly recommend everybody who if you are ever traveling to chongqing,
you have to go and visit Sichuan Fine Art Institute (川美Chuan Mei）
new campus.
You're gonna get blown away by its architecture,
by its landscape architecture.
If you're a landscape architecture student
you have to go,
it's one of the places in chongqing that made
Martha Schwartz drop her jaw
Third point on the positive end.
I am happy with the casting choice in general.
I don't think anyone performed exceeding my expectation, but again,
they're all qualified for their roles.
I think a lot of people were worried about,
for example, fan cheng cheng being an idol and not really a professional actor.
And inevitably,
these days when you hire idol actor,
you have the double edged sword situation
where you have free fandom promotion for you.
But then on the other hand,
backlashes that could happen if this person
doesn't perform to satisfactory level.
I think fang chengcheng did a satisfactory job,
nothing outstanding or special,
but doesn't pull me out the story.
And then I like looking at Wen Qi and she did a good job too,
but her role doesn't have that much room for
her to show you just how actually good she is.
As an actress,
the most interesting roles and probably performed to the
most exciting moment and definitely most watchable on screen
are the two male actors,
Shao Bing and Feng Shaofeng playing their characters
wouldn't spoil it too much for you.
But there are a couple of scenes between
these two actors that are very well done.
Then the 4th thing I think most importantly is this is a
meeting my expectation kind of thriller mystery drama that you just
expect would come out of light on
the ad fits the actual product,
accurate positioning and accurate expectation management,
unlike it's predecessor,
the first Light On drama this year,
which you expect one thing and then you got another.
In terms of the story quality itself,
from the first scene
it started to give you clues about what the story is,
what each character is.
And it integrates the character design and
their personal story with the major plot.
Pretty much every scene is designed for a specific purpose,
even though I don't think it has anything that's outstanding well written,
it's still reasonably well presented.
So these are the good things about the drama
and I definitely got entertained throughout.
Then let's talk about things that are not ideal.
And why
At this point, it's only a one gold mine,
the first not so ideal thing,
I think maybe largely to do with the fact that
it didn't go through censorship the first round.
So they had to edit a lot of stuff out and change that
you can tell certain lines are redoubled.
The lips don't sync
The other thing that shows up that shows you this
thing has gotten changed quite a lot is
timing, location is very vague
you knowIt's kind of in the future because they
are using devices that do not exist today.
They intentionally blur out time.
For example, there's a thing between two characters.
One is asking the other which year do you graduate from this university
literally the characters says
A303
What kind of time is that?
it's not a human time
We don't have A303,
we have 2,000 something or 19 something.
The city is called lv teng (green vine)
which is the same name they gave to the city where crime crackdown takes place.
So chongqing now is the green vine,
Gothem of china
and then they also blur
out the government organizations and police.
And there's a funny shot of a big like a headquarter
of the governmental organization who is
keeping tracks on all kinds of things in a very high tech way.
and it's literally represented as an elevator that
goes up into the sky and onto the top of clouds.
And that organization and their entire headquarter is
IN THE CLOUDS
with like very middle aged dressed in suits,
very government official looking guy
but it's in the CLOUDS!
So it cannot be more floating and unrealistic and ungrounded than this.
so I think the original version probably is set in a real time,
like maybe 2035?
something like that.
So the result of that is it is totally detached of.
Any kind of reality,
even though I know it's filmed in chongqing,
I can tell this is like there there there,
but the mental space,
the imagined dramaland that is set up by the story
in the audiences' mind
due to all these type of problems
become super detached from reality.
There's already a level of unbelievableness due to that.
And the details of the tech do not help,
because you see our male lead character holds this cellphone
that is translucent piece of plastic,
trying to make it futuristic.
But you literally only see the wisher app shows up with the butterfly,
any other kind of interaction with this device,
how it actually operate, how you, for example,
it's just a slab of acrylic, right?
How does it come to life when you type on it?
When you use other functions?
What does it look like?
They don't do any of those details of using that so called
a little bit futuristic tech,
which result in again, unbelievableness,
it's not so grounded and so filled with believable details that you can 100%
believe in the story
plus of its rather crazy
concept of the butterfly effect thing.
It becomes even less believable.
The second thing on the negative end is,
although I said it's a qualified thriller drama,
it is not convincing enough.
If you want to go full analytical about its logics,
for example, there is an important part of the first half of the story.
So spoiler alert of this Wisher app
trying to achieve a goal of making a car crash happen and kill a person.
This app gave different people who are making a wish to it,
to complete tasks that seems to be very random.
But eventually,
it will have the butterfly effect of causing this
to happen, that to happen and leading to this person's
accidental death
the paint that's hanging on the tree needs to fall down onto this big truck's,
windshield, and distract
The drivers, make them lose control.
Therefore,
the furniture on the back of their truck will fall down and
then causing the accident for the car that's following it,
where the driver is,
the person at the app wants to kill.
There is no explanation of how the Wsher app
calculated that it is specifically at that point,
the paint will drop onto the windshield.
And then even that happens how do you explain,
just because he did that, therefore,
it's for sure that all the furnitures on the back will fall out.
These details don't get explained.
So if you really wanna you know like scrutinize
this doesn't make sense
well, it doesn't make sense.
It really doesn't.
And I don't think the next six episodes
is gonna go into detail of explaining it.
So that part is absolutely,
depending upon how far you wanna make the
creators accountable for their storytelling,
if you wanna let them go easy,
you can still continue watching it and be happy about it.
If you're one of those people who just need the logic to be perfect,
then it would not satisfy you.
I think it's a really dangerous thing for script writers.
When they try to attempt to outsmart the audiences these days,
if the script writer is not significantly
more clever than the most clever people,
then you can't outsmart us.
And therefore it becomes really dumb when
you try to do that and kind of failed at it,
might as well just not write a story that's
purely riding on like
I am cleverer than you are.
But look at other angles
digging at other stuff.
There are many ways that a story can go
that could also make it very impactful
So Wisher would give you this vibe
They're trying to make a really cool story and parts of it are.
But then at the most important thing that's the nature of
this type of storytelling
they didn't really succeed at that.
Had it do better at dealing with human relationships,
emotional part of the story,
great acting, more great acting moments, it may
convince me to rate it a little bit higher,
even though I can see on the rational side of the story
a lot of things don't make sense.
Unfortunately,
it is also not strong in that department.
It only is not pulling me out of the story.
It hasn't really made me love any of the characters at this point.
And it's already halfway
so likely to stay as one goldmine
if it didn't completely fall apart at the end of it.
Hope this is helpful for you to decide whether
you should start checking out Wisher
Zhi Ming Yuan Wang
Thank you for watching AvenueX
I'll see you in my next video.
Meanwhile, live long and happy drama watching.