Reality Check

Memories of the Alhambra is a very ambitious romantic action k-drama that pairs dazzling special effects in virtual reality and beautiful real world locations in Spain with an unusual storyline and a love story between unlikely characters, all of which combines for a viewing experience that is equal parts fun and frustrating.

High tech CEO Yoo Jin-woo (Hyun Bin) travels to Granada, Spain in order to obtain the rights to a virtual reality quest-style game played via contact lenses, created by teenager Jung Se-joo (Park Chan-yeol). He also has the chance to play the game while in Granada, and finds it the most exciting development in VR he's ever seen. Se-joo abruptly goes missing, and Jin-woo learns his ex-friend and current rival may have something to do with that.

While trying to secure rights to the game by purchasing the decrepit hostel belonging to Se-joo’s older sister, Jung Hee-joo (Park Shin-hye), Jin-woo also begins to fall for her. They are that rich man/poor girl combination that k-dramas so love, but Hee-joo seems to genuinely care about him, which breaks through his cynical outlook. Jin-woo then uses the game to stage a duel with his rival, and ends up killing him. That's when the dividing line between the real world and the game is erased, and Jin-woo becomes trapped in the game, which activates on its own even after he removes the lenses and logs out. He finds he must battle for his life every day until he can fix the bug with the game.

Hyun Bin did an amazing job portraying Jin-woo, and at times I became completely immersed in how he portrayed his character's horrible situation. Imagine spending a year fighting for your life every single day. Park Shin-hye was also lovely and composed as she portrayed both the heroine and a pivotal character inside the game, although in the end I felt she was used more as a foil for Hyun Bin, which wasted her talent. The two other performances that impressed me most were by Min Jin-woong as Jin-woo's loyal secretary, who is completely lovable, and Park Hoon as Cha Hyung-seok, Jin-woo's rival who becomes terrifyingly immortalized in the game.

Is the entire storyline plausible? I'm no VR expert, but as far as the game goes it has some major problems with the logic, especially toward the end, when we find it actually is possible for Jin-woo to exit the game (and as smart as he is, I think he would have thought of it long before a year had passed.) What happened to Se-joo was literally impossible, too. I also found the sacrifical solution to the bug in the game not at all inventive like the rest of the series. Using the game's logic it would make more sense to remove the character responsible for all the chaos, but there you go.

This could have been one of the best dramas I've ever watched. About two-thirds of the way through it started to fall apart and all that amazing potential fell by the wayside. I can't tell if the director wanted a guy ending or the screenwriter simply fumbled the story, but it left me feeling very disappointed. I wanted to rewrite the last third of it myself, which is how much I was invested in it. Anyway, if you're okay with being left frustrated, it's still available to watch on Netflix.