Letter #127: The Tyrant

Good morning, Erin.

To help resolve a minor computer issue at work, someone needed to take a picture of what was displayed on my screen—but he ran into trouble because the camera wouldn’t focus on the screen but, instead, the little picture of V that you gave me, because the camera recognized it as a human face and, therefore, what it was most likely supposed to focus on. 

Which made me laugh, of course, but also made me go, “Aww, I miss Erin.”

That said, the previous day, I stopped halfway through writing an email, leaned back in my chair, and sighed, “Aww, I miss Erin,” so it’s not like I needed much of a prompt. 

[restarts “Erin Does Singing” playlist]

Someone else I miss is Good Boy—but now I miss him less, because he was in a thing! A weird, four-episode thing, but still a thing! And that’s something to celebrate. 

But do I mean celebrate in principle or in actuality? Well, I suppose that’s why we’re here.

So, if you’re ready to unleash The Tyrant…then, uh…okay, um, I seem not to have a punchline ready for that. That’s a little embarrassing. 

1. At the end of the day, The Tyrant is written and directed by the same guy who wrote and directed The Witch, Night in Paradise, and The Childe—and it’s basically just more of those: stylish, well-acted, filled with gun fights, a vaguely sci-fi element that seems modestly out of place in the otherwise grounded story, and a plot that barely qualifies as being coherent. If you’ve seen and enjoyed any of those other movies, I don’t see why you wouldn’t enjoy this. (I mean, it’s a mini-series rather than a movie, but…I mean, if we’re honest, it’s clearly just a long-ish movie that got broken up into four parts so it wouldn’t have to be cut down to a reasonable movie runtime.)

2. But did I enjoy it? Um…I guess. It’s hard to understand what’s going on, insofar as the specifics of the matter are concerned, and that took away a deal of my enjoyment. But the action is really good, the movie looks rad, the pacing is solid, and the actors do a great job playing characters the audience is given very little context for. There are a few moments that rely on “rule of cool” more than any semblance of believability, which bothered me, and the lack of information about the characters made it hard to invest fully in what was going on. But, overall, I had a good enough time. Or, to scale it: it was way better than both The Witch and The Childe, but it wasn’t as good as Night in Paradise. But also…Good Boy, so 10/10.

3. And it looks like the writer/director pulled in a couple of his friends from his other projects for this, as well—so you know I knew some of the actors!

• Good Boy from Start-Up as Director Choe*

• Blue Oni from A Korean Odyssey as Mr. Lim

• Start-Up Dead Dad from Start-Up as the Director Sa

• Coach Choi from Weightlifting Fairy as an intelligence broker or something

• the tattooed prisoner girl from Mask Girl as Coach Choi’s bodyguard

• the cowardly dude with the ponytail from Sweet Home as a doctor

3A. *My subtitles said Good Boy was named “Choe” but MDL has him listed as “Choi.” I put very little effort into discovering why that might be. 

3B. So, we’ve got a vague mini-reunion with Good Boy and Start-Up Dead Dad both being in Start-Up (vague because they never have a chance to cross paths), but we have a much less vague mini-reunion between Start-Up Dead Dad and Coach Choi who were both in It’s Okay to Not be Okay (less vague in that, while I don’t remember them crossing paths, at least both characters were alive while in the same general vicinity).

3C. And there’s how Blue Oni and Coach Choi were both in Night in Paradise (so, mini-reunion for them AND with the writer/director) , though her character is only around at the start of the movie, so they never come close to crossing paths. (And, for good measure, Good Boy is, of course, also in The Childe. (As was the guy who plays Paul in The Tyrant, but I don’t remember him being in the movie, so…shrug.))

4. In a detail I fail to understand, the subtitles for the (fully correct) spoken English lines don’t match what is being said aloud. Now, maybe the subtitles are made to match the English dub (assuming there is one available), but I thought it was weird. But, y’know, when aren’t Disney+ subtitles weird?

5. Despite playing relatively static characters—that is, characters who are stylized or deliberately one-dimensional—the main four actors breathe a lot of life into their characters, whether by being particularly skilled actors or through their natural charisma. Which is maybe harder to conceptualize without seeing the show…or maybe it’s actually quite easy to conceptualize, and what’s difficult is parsing my explanation. Regardless, I think the actors bring something to their performances that the script does not.

5A. Good Boy is particularly good, playing deadpan/stoic with an unexpected whimsy that makes the surprisingly intimidating Choe feel much more human than he probably would with another actor. 

5B. And then there’s Blue Oni, whose Mr. Lim probably steals the show for me, both because he’s easily the most dynamic and interesting character of the bunch and because the actor is just charming as f***. If you hope anyone makes it to the end, it’s him. 

6. The main girl, Ja-gyeong, is mostly pretty awesome: great character design, solid introduction, believable enough fight choreography (given she’s a tiny lady), interesting backstory/quirks. Unfortunately, she’s also the weakest point of the story—not from anything specific to the character, exactly, but because she’s the most obvious “tryhard” element of the story, with the desire to make her seem “badass” often outweighing the need to be at all realistic to the scenarios she finds herself in. That is, though she is clearly a skilled killer, and though the show earns a  fair suspension of disbelief with the “cool factor” of some of her fight scenes, she is too often—especially as the story goes on—the beneficiary of writing contrivances that make her enemies decide getting the drop on her means it’s time to talk at her and allow her time to get out of the situation rather than just killing her like they have done to everyone they’ve come across prior to her in the story. (There are two egregious instances of this that I can remember off the top of my head. The first is just stupid from top to bottom—but the second leads to a fun and interesting fight that could have been so much better if its first couple of moments had just been written a little bit differently.) Which sucks, because there’s so much to Ja-gyeong that we don’t explore but should have, but…gotta make her look tough and cool every chance we get, right?

7. At no point does anyone shout, “THE TYRANT’S EYE IS THE STRONGEST!” and that made me sad. 

7A. I mean, I was shouting it the whole time, but…

7B. …

7C. It’s an anime reference. From Love, Chuunibyo, & Other Delusions.

Rikka is a lonely high school girl who has retreated into an inner fantasy where she has a power called “the Tyrant’s Eye” which allows her to cast magic spells. And she will frequently let everyone know that she is not to be trifled with, that she cannot be defeated, because “the Tyrant’s Eye is the strongest!”

7D. Not that you need to know this, of course. But…just to say: in the alternate universe where our relationship was instigated by you taking anime recommendations from me, this is one of the ones I’d have eventually pointed you towards. But just the first season.

7E. Actually, I think I still have the list I made of what I’d recommend you and in what order. Lemme see if…aha! There it is. Yeah, there’s Love, Chuunibyo, & Other Delusions. What else is on…wait, I was going to recommend Ground Control to Psychoelectric Girl but not After the Rain? Past-Daryl, what were you thinking?! I’m sorry, alternate-universe Erin—I’ll take another pass at this list. 

8. By the second episode, Director Choe’s character design has changed from that of a sort of mild-mannered researcher to just, y’know, regular Good Boy. I don’t know why. As in, I don’t know why he has more than one look. I can see why they would have gone with one or the other, but not why it isn’t consistent. [shrug] That said, does anyone but me care?

9. Mr. Lim has this AWESOME speech about trains…but I can’t promise it makes any kind of sense. 

10. Not to get spoiler-y, but my favorite detail in the entire show is Ja-gyeong’s funerary hair bow. Absolutely loved it.

11. I’ve mentioned that characters don’t receive context that would have really fleshed them out and made them easier to understand (and, for the most part, more interesting). Ja-gyeong’s missing context is probably the most interesting, but I think what we don’t get for Director Choe may be the most consequential since it’s the thing that most clearly defines both who he is as a character and what his motivations are: he’s a hardcore Korean patriot—which is particularly significant when he is put into antagonistic opposition to Paul, a Korean who is an American intelligence asset. When do we learn this about Choe? At the end of the final episode. Long after he’s already given a fantastic speech questioning why the world order has to remain static with certain countries being allowed to be superpowers and others not. Now, we don’t need to know he’s a super-patriot for him to make this speech and have it make sense with what we do know about him and his actions, but it sure as hell would have landed a lot harder if we had. Again, I credit Good Boy for being able to bring a lot to Choe without having a script that tells us much about him (even implicitly), but I don’t know how he could have acted this information to us without explicit opportunities raised in the script. 

11A. That said, Good Boy looks pretty good smoking. Which, as we have established, is something a lot of actors can’t pull off. And, I suppose, tells us something about Choe, right? Maybe?

And that’s about all I have for that. The Tyrant is what it is. And that’s fine. Probably. 

I’m back to having bitten off more than I probably should have, watch list-wise, but hey, that’s a boon to you, right? Of course it is. Means there’s so much more coming your way. And what’s more important than hearing from me?

“Well—”

THERE’S NO TIME, ERIN!

—Daryl