K-drama Island Part 2: action-fantasy series starring Kim Nam-gil on Amazon Prime Video continues down its rocky road
- The second instalment of the fantasy series set on South Korea’s Jeju Island takes us back 600 years to when the island was its own kingdom
- The series has bad costumes and even worse CGI, and the presentation of the fantasy world in which the action takes place is headache-inducing
Island features a Catholic priest – Johan, portrayed by Cha Eun-woo of K-pop boy band Astro – but it takes place in a fantasy world set on Jeju Island comprising supernatural phenomena that appear in Korean folklore as well as novel elements invented for the story.
This hodgepodge of religious and supernatural inspirations make the story and the world in which it takes place quite hard to pin down.
The rules are inconsistent and there are no governing set of principles to guide us.
That means the story can theoretically go anywhere, but the flip side of this is that it doesn’t build up from anything concrete to begin with.
Part 2 of Island – streaming worldwide on Amazon Prime Video – seeks to redress that by finally letting us know who these characters are and what kind of a world they live in.
The first of these six episodes is essentially an extended flashback to the time when Jeju formed the Tamna kingdom, before being taken over by the Joseon dynasty that ruled the Korean mainland in 1404.
