July 16, 2013
After over a month’s wait since the release of the original
music video, EXO finally releases
the drama version to their song Wolf.
If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out below!
Korean Version
Chinese Version
Generally, the drama version of a song is released within a
week of the original/dance version of the song and vice versa. However, SM Entertainment with their sadistic
ways decided to wait nearly 7 weeks until releasing the drama version for Wolf. In the fast paced world of Kpop,
making a move like this is considered extremely risky especially since idol
groups generally begin wrapping up their promotions after eight weeks. There
could be a number of reasons for this but that’s for another time.
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| Kris: Now go forth, Luhan, and show them how terrible you are at parkour. |
The music video: The video itself is filled with awkward transitions, terrible acting,
and highly unnecessary scenes. On the plus side, the video doesn’t take place
in one of SM’s signature box sets. Taking the spot as the lead actor throughout
the video is none other than Luhan, who fills the roll of “brooding guy with a
secret and a crush on a girl he randomly met and rescued while avoiding a fight
which he would be highly outnumbered in who happened to go to the same school
as him”. The video starts off with Kris meeting Luhan in an alleyway for
reasons unknown and confirming that the members of EXO do indeed have super
powers. After that awkward interaction, Luhan starts running around flexing his
mediocre parkour skills by doing random, meaningless flips here and there, possibly
just to look cool. And from then on, we have our typical drama up until the
point where the members of EXO begin their huge fight with some gang in an
abandoned warehouse. How is this different from others, you might ask? How many
dramas with fight scenes like this take time to admire the handsome faces of
their actors in slow motion while they’re in mid fight? That’s what I thought. As
far as the transitions between scenes, the music video gives off a trailer for a drama rather than actually seeming like a drama. At the end, the
music stops and the worst, most awkward, part of the whole thing ensues: the girl
finds out that Luhan has super powers that make him rage hardcore and runs away
in a fit of tears. The music video could have ended there, but apparently there’s
more to come. We’re left off with a “to be continued”, possibly to make a
second video where Luhan actually gets the girl.
The song(s): The music video crams in four songs, all in 3 minutes and 38 seconds
which is a smaller amount of time than the original video itself. It starts off
with the bare instrumentals for Black
Pearl before running through the instrumentals and choruses of Heart Attack and Don’t Go and then finally playing a small snippet of Wolf. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t
even give this music video the title “Wolf” when less than half of the video
actually has the song playing. It’s more of a sampler for the other songs on
the album. Also, the transitions between each song is extremely
awkward and doesn’t seem to fit well with their assigned scenes.
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| I'm so disappointed in you, SM |
Overall
opinion: SM Entertainment seems to be trying to do quite a lot with this
music video, maybe even too much. The idea they were trying to go for was unique and interesting but
they fell flat because they couldn’t figure out how to execute it properly to create
a smooth fluid video. It’s obvious that EXO is their experimental group and
they’re still struggling to find something that actually works. Even if this a
folly on their part, loyal SM fans will eat it all up without asking any
questions.
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I'm pretty sure this wasn't the original drama vertion because after they korean fans pissed the selfs because of the kiss scene in the teaser they probably had to shoot the whole thing again.
ReplyDeleteI found the drama vertion a bit Lackluster, it was alright but I didn't tet my mind blown or anything and there really wasn't any emotional moment or anything.
Though, I didn't write this article, imho, I found it a lackluster, too. It looked like it was quickly put together without much thought, even some of the transitions looking like something I could probably produce myself. The acting was obvious and them going with the storyline (which sucked) seemed forced to go along to.
ReplyDeleteYeah - based on the teaser, I'm sure the original version was even cheesier than this.
ReplyDelete