The Deer King

The Deer King had the potential to be a truly amazing film. The visuals are gorgeous, the music is amazing, the story is intriguing, and the setting has its undeniable charm. It's just that the whole thing seems sort of half-baked. The characters and their motivations and relationships are not fleshed out enough, you need to work out a lot of things on your own to make it all hold together and see the amazing overall picture and realize what it's supposed to be about. The film was aiming to be a grand spectacle in the style of Studio Ghibli's best works like Princess Mononoke. It tries to play out an intricate story with various different characters and their goals, but the characters’ motivations are only explained just enough to make you understand them, but you won't feel it and you will barely find it convincing. It's probably because the film format didn't offer enough space for this much material, and so a lot of the explanations, including even such basics as an effective exposition, were simply skimped on, and much of it feels incomplete. It negatively affects your overall impression as you have to concentrate a lot to make sense of everything, and there's something lacking to make you fully relate to the characters. There are a lot of important characters and not all of them get the space they deserve. You have to make a lot of assumptions about them to get the full picture and make sense of it all. The only relationship that is fleshed out is the one between Van and Yuna. I had no problem believing it and I enjoyed their journey together, but all the other important things around them weren’t that great. Dr. Hossar was fairly likable, as well as tracker Sae, but did I learn enough about them to make sense of their actions? Especially with Sae, it was pretty hard, and I had to guess her motivations from the subtle clues the series offered. These are two of the more important supporting characters, and they are already missing something, not to mention the rest. King Aquafa, his advisor, the administrator Yotaru, and the resistance leader Ofan – all these characters played a big role, and the entire conflict revolved around them, but their motivations and reasoning were explained in an extremely superficial way. The same goes for the message of the film. You really have to search for it and deduce it from certain scenes, or from what some of the characters say, instead of having it shown to you in a powerful and dramatic way. The film doesn’t really highlight what is important. It doesn't have enough power or depth. Even if you can sense that there is depth to it, and you can see how amazing and intense the story could have been, you actually end up quite disappointed. What could have been a 5-star experience only deserves a very weak 4*, and I’m being generous. It probably would have been better as a series with more space for everything... 6.5/10 (04/10/2022)