Can Hai Hua (2024)

Zhang Qiling fanfiction brought to you by...BEER! (and bugs)

So this was alright?

I'm gonna say upfront - my expectations were zero. After "Explore With The Note" (which was unbelievably awful), I was pretty much done with the series. And this show dragged so long to release that I expected a mangled carcass cut up by the censors.
That said, it is quite clear that the censors did have issues that needed to be worked around - the episodes have quite varying lengths and you can often notice entire scenes where the dialogue clearly doesn't match what the actors were actually saying.
This was probably inevitable what with the whole Ultimate being a thing, the Bronze Door and that kind of stuff.
But it wasn't as bad as I feared at the beginning - after a weird and slow start the show kicked off pretty well.
It was also quite difficult, I can imagine, to do all the flashbacks they did. And to reveal the story bit by bit so it still made sense. You can tell it was difficult, because there are several scenes purely for exposition and they do feel quite clunky. But overall it works ok.
It took me a while to get used to this Wuxie, he actually looks and acts quite old while not being as cool as the ones in Reunion or Tomb of the Sea. But he does well with the philosophical and emotional stuff.
Fatty is consistently good, this actor is the ultimate one in my opinion. (though his comedic relief felt a bit much at times)
Zhang Qiling is...well, they always choose the same type of actors, you don't get much acting from these guys.
Overall this is actually a pretty solid return to form as a tomb raiding drama - you get the foreigners who don't mean well who the protagonists have to race against, or temporarily team up with. But this time that dastardly foreigner gets a redemption arc! Neat.
The various story subarcs and locations are fairly interesting, the sets and props look decent and there's even some location shooting - you can tell they actually went to the mountains and shot in the cold.
And it all eventually stumbles (as the show itself accurately calls it) to a satisfying ending.
I still prefer Reunion by a lot, but this was good - surprisingly so.

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