Pending Train

I remember sitting glued to the the screen over the years of LOST, loving every minute of its mystery and weird conspiracy and undermining western culture with exceptional knowledge of travel in time, and all of the insane and quirky and deceitful characters onboard the plane, who found themselves washed up on the island and had to survive and build relationships and trust and agree to survive and build alliences with the people already on the island and find food and water and keep up hope among each other and assist births and bury the dead and be inventive and strong and compassionate etc.

Pending Train tries and fails. No tension, just stereotypic characters acting stereotypical confronted with very little happening. And maybe they represent an average of Japanese culture, but when no one had moved to find water on day two, I began wondering if the series writers were paid to extend a 3-parter to 10 or more episodes.

This is WEAK and a wast of money and other resources, chiefly human watching this in the expectance that something will improve, but that is not the case. NOTHING happens that will come as a surprise to anyone. Most characters are depicted as outright stupid - as if having lived 20, 30, 50 years under all kinds of pressure in life had not emparted preference, idiosyncracies (apart from those needed to separate main characters from each other) and a general IDEA of how to survive. Like in a universe, where No One has spend hours binging youtube videos to gather an abundence of information about all kinds of stuff related to living and surviving and pleasure and communication and relations to others etc etc. IGNORANTS, basically.

Actually I am a little horrified that this "product" has met some kinds of production standards somewhere in the world. As if its basically a tax write-off, where nobody really cares. A deal, where some actors are introduced, payment for that service met, and production costs used to leverage an abundance of wealth.

Horrible. Just horrible.

So, why 5/10?

I am at episode 6/10, and there are 5 more episodes to go. So, 1 star pr. Episode, basically. But if wont end with 10/10, be certain of that. Ye Gods!

I really wanted to enjoy this because the plot is a good one but the slow burning repeated drama takes over the whole thing, it becomes exhausting and you will likely forward through the forced and dull unnecessary dialogue along with the character's long pauses.

The plot is easily split with 20% apocalyptic exciting storyline with a purpose, but is interrupted with 80% of depressing melodrama tears, flashbacks and unnecessary character-buildup attempts. It's like ordering a pepperoni pizza and receiving it with only one small piece of pepperoni on top. The rest is just covered with plain cheese.

Oh stop it already will you?

Barely a science fiction except for the plot and a few rare strange things here and there.

Basic common sense things missing, actors are always fresh, wearing new clothes, survive just fine not feeling hungry for extended period of time. Some character development is the only thing that is not so bad. Strange unnatural emotions such as not being grateful for someone saving your life! Overall not very entertaining, if you have nothing else to do and you are extremely bored you can watch it in 1.5x speed. Don't let "japanese" mislead you, they can be bad too :) Highly doubt there will be a second season any time soon, if at all.

The premise is good but I watched the whole first episode and can't bring myself to watch any more of it.

All the 'actors' are pretty boys and girls no normal looking people at all. They all seem to be terrible actors over acting every emotion and scene. The direction seems to go for melodramatic shots everywhere with an awful melodramatic soundtrack. In one surreal scene there is one of the characters over acting a crying ad sadness scene with an upbeat pop tune playing quite loudly as the soundtrack. It's just weird. There's a scene near the end where it shows each character's serious face multiple times - it reminded of the nodding scene in Family Guy.

I think the first thing to know when watching anything that comes from Japan is that it's not South Korea or a K-DRAMA, the Japanese entertaiment people do their works and projects with Japanese people in mind, they don't care one bit about making ot outside of Japan so they want to just be liked in Japan, and that's a big difference on how they do things and how things are written or directed at the end, because we all have very different cultures and way to portray feelings or do art. Japanese entertaiment and writting on movies or tv shows is HEAVILY based on the facial expressions more than anything, specially the eyes (that's why on anime, the eyes are THAT big), so it's not surprising when we watch Japanese movies or shows that have a good plot (be it a 'LOST' copy or not, we know it is, but LOST itself probably came from somewhere too I assume), most of the times the writting or directing takes points off from our point of view due to the fact that Hollywood and Europe write or direct things very differently.

I think the show could be great, the actors are amazing dramatic actors, I did watched some of the works of some of them and I know they're not bad at acting, the plot of the story was also good, sci-fi, time travel thingy, the way 'LOST' was great, however I think the lack of choosing a good song (It's a J-DRAMA after all, and Da-ICE are actually really famous and respected in Japan, they have great music, 'Tattoo' isn't just a good fix for this specific show) for the theme music and the cultural difference on how things are written in her and in Asia, played a big part...So overall, I think this show could've been great if it was written and directed like Hollywood does it for us, but it's made for Japan and I think more or less, Japanese people enjoyed it.

So my take on this whole thing? Watch it if you want, it's entertaining and at times fun and sad, like usual, I ended up shipping the two male actors more than the female and male actors, it's always nice to see actors I follow, again, it's no masterpiece, it's a J-DRAMA, but if you like these genre of tv shows, give it a try, it's not THAT bad in a drama from Asia level.