TV Asahi’s “Roppongi Class”, the Japanese version of JTBC’s drama “Itaewon Class”, recently started airing, but it has not surpassed the original. It is mainly evaluated that the overall drama quality is inferior to the original.
In general, it is pointed out that “Characters and lines are the same as ‘Itaewon Class‘, so what distinguishes it from the original?” The response is that directing and acting skills as well as visual beauty are more sloppy than “Itaewon Class” even though it is a remake.
In this regard, there are posts on Korea’s online communities comparing the same scenes in the two works and criticizing the poor performance of “Roppongi Class”. One of them is a post uploaded on FM Korea.
Jo Yi-seo (played by Kim Da-mi), who just turned 20 in 2016, is drinking with her friends in Itaewon to celebrate her becoming an adult. Then, a group of men joins them. However, Yi-seo, who is not interested, gets up first. A “gangster” man follows Yi-seo and grabs her.
A quarrel continues between Yi-seo, who says “I’ll go”, and the gangster man, who asks “If you’re going to do that, why did you drink?” Finally, the gangster man cannot hold back his anger and hits Yi-seo in the face.
In this scene, the gangster man slaps realistically to the point where it seems like he actually hit her.
On the other hand, in the same setting, the Japanese male actor turns his right arm into the air at a distance of several dozen centimeters. The woman pretends to be slapped and turns her head automatically. There is no sense of hitting here. It is obviously a sloppy scene.
Netizens poured out harsh criticism, such as “Hand-fanning”, “The director doesn’t seem to be greedy for the work”, “The actress’ facial expression looks like an amateur” and “There’s a reason why Japanese dramas always fail.”
According to Netflix’s aggregation site Flix Patrol, “Roppongi Class” was pushed out of the top 10 in the Japanese Netflix TV show category rankings as of July 28th. Rather, the original “Itaewon Class” is still in second place.
This is a disappointing result compared to the ambitious start by gathering rising stars in Japan, such as Takeuchi Ryoma as Park Sae-ro-yi, Hirate Yurina as Jo Yi-seo and Araki Yuko as Oh Soo-ah.
This contrasts with the unprecedented long-term success of “Itaewon Class” in Japan, including topping Netflix Japan for 52 consecutive weeks.
Source: wikitree
