Review of Descendants of the Sun / 태양의 후예

For those of you who stumbled upon this website through the mysterious magical powers of the Internet, welcome! My name is Ashley, and I started this website to keep track of and archive all of the kinds of movies, books, and television shows I’ve come across in the years.

I used to work as a professional film and television critic at an online outlet, but because I wasn’t focusing on the kinds of films I wanted to, I eventually left that job behind and went to work on my own thing. That’s how I ended up focusing on this blog a bit more, then I temporarily entered an unemployed blip that was unexpected, so I had even more time to write about the movies I’ve seen while I was job hunting.

This blog post emerges from an ongoing project I’ve been working on with the blog. In the past, I would write little reviews of the movies and shows I was watching, but then I never put them anywhere. As someone who was always interested in tracking my thoughts and progress throughout the years, this was the perfect way to keep all of it together.

So some of the posts that are coming out in the next few months are older reviews that I’m updating to have them somewhere that can’t be lost easily. It’s a fascinating way to watch yourself evolve as a person, see how your thoughts changed in a decade or so, and evaluate how you’ve grown or stayed stagnant.

This is officially my second to last post in this little series! I watched Descendants of the Sun when it first came out all of these years ago, when I was still in high school, and I can clearly remember how all of the girlies were being obsessed with Song Joong-ki specifically. I think he’s a great actor, but back then I wasn’t fangirling over him.

I felt like I could remember this show clearly, but I was afraid of messing up some details, so I went back and rewatched it for the purpose of writing this review. And man, that was a trip back into the past for sure.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction, as I know this isn’t what you’re here for probably.

An army captain and a doctor on a medical mission fall in love in a dangerous area overseas.

The opening in this series in in Korea, when the male lead, Yoo Si-jin, is off-duty and back home with his friend Dae-young, a fellow sergeant. They watch a young man steal a motorbike and stop him, but when the kid gets injured, they go to the hospital to find him because Dae-young realizes that the kid nabbed his phone before he left.

There, Si-jin meets the female lead, Kang Mo-yeon. She’s a doctor a the hospital, and these two have instant chemistry, but she thinks he’s a part of the gang with the thief. Mo-yeon’s rival Myung-ju proves that Si-jin and Dae-young are a part of the army though, and the two begin slowly dating.

However, Si-jin is still in the army, and he gets called back into work often. This disrupts their time together a lot, and Mo-yeon is dealing with her own problems at work because of nepotism. Frustrated with this and Si-jin, she calls off their relationship, and they go their own ways.

Si-jin is sent out to a war town country called Uruk, and Mo-yeon almost a year later, finds herself there too. She was put on a medical volunteer team, despite not wanting to go, and she discovers Si-jin is there. Lots of conflict is ahead of them due to war and environmental concerns, but above all else, these two are going to fall in love.

This show is packed with drama, although on a second watch it comes across as a bit more cliche and corny to me. I’m a little bit wiser and older, and I’ve simply read and watched a lot more since 2016. They do have really good chemistry as a couple though, which is what makes this show pretty decent.

The side characters and B plot are also pleasant. Dae-young and Myung-ju have a thing going on in the background, but play the dance of whether they can actually date or not. They assume no, so they awkwardly try to pretend nothing is going on where there is clearly something going on at times.

There is also a fun little plot twist towards the end which can be a little unpredictable, which caught me off guard the first time I watched the show. Like we kind of knew it’s coming, as this is a Korean romance drama, but I did not expect the nature of this twist!

Overall Thoughts

As I mentioned before, I think this is a pretty decent show overall. It was great back then, but it wasn’t as great as, for example, Guardian: The Great and Lonely God. That show was a work of art, even if the plot was stretched a little too thin.

This drama the plot isn’t stretched to the point where I was rolling my eyes. The 16 episodes flew by if we’re going to be honest, and I think it was because I was actually invested in these characters and their wellbeing. I wanted to know what happened to them in the end, which kept me going.

If you haven’t watched this already or need a rewatch, go ahead and do so! I think this is a Korean drama classic for a reason.

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