Why Meteor Garden 2018 Sucks: PART ONE (Technically Bad)

I am angry. Can you tell? I am genuinely far more angry at Meteor Garden 2018 than the drama deserves. To sum up what this unnecessary shit-post is going to say: An adaptation must adapt, or it will fail, and Meteor Garden fails. Of course, it's worse than that. Ironically, this show - which is simply bad - is complex in why exactly it is bad. Firstly, I want to get in the technicalities of why Meteor Garden is a bad show. In part two, I'll talk specifically what ruined it for me, why I couldn't ignore the problems and bathe in the wonderful Hanadan nostalgia.

I'll start by pointing out the one thing I liked about the show. Despite the fact that the actors who play this iteration of F4 are all rookies, I found them quite charming. I'll probably be looking out for them from now on. They're pretty green, but regardless they had alarming screen precise and their chemistry together was surprisingly palpable. I feel like it was only in the scenes where they were joking around together that the dialogue actually worked. Okay, enough praise, let's get into the rant.
  Meteor Garden was intended to build upon the source material of Hana Yori Dango - when the adaptation was announced over a year ago, producer Angie Chai described (who worked on the Taiwanese 2001 adaptation of the same name) the drama as a "fuller - and flashier - adaptation of the books". Flashier, it may be. The drama was fully pre-produced, and looks it. But what does a pretty shot mean if there is no substance to it? Do you know what word we use for that? Superficial.
  It is by no means "fuller" than any other Hana Yori Dango adaptation. That is, unless, they define that as padding out the overall run-time. At a shocking 49 episodes, Meteor Garden drags in a phenomenally unique manner. It somehow manages to make each scene feel overlong and boring, sometimes maybe ten minutes of a conversation that could have been written concisely. Lingering shots, empty footage and (especially in the last few episodes) unnecessary amounts of flashbacks all cooperate to make Meteor Garden the most dangerously inflated drama I've watched in a while.
  Yet, at the same time, it passes by too quickly. Practically every plot-point that I've seen in every Hana Yori Dango adaptation until now was included in this script, even some ones that I'm certain were not canon in the manga, and they manage to resolve every arc before it sits long enough to engage the audience. Tsukushi and Tsukasa's break up after he goes abroad and breaks contact with her, for example, is not used to draw out an emotional response like the others did so well. In every other version it takes time for him to win back her trust, as it should. Here, he is truthful with her after having already pushed her away, and unlike the other dramas in which she's too hurt from his actions to look at him, she just runs off with him! Problem solved!
  In other words, actions didn't seem to have consequences here. They set up a ginormous hurdle, and then have the characters leisurely walk around it. That isn't how this works! There was always a laughably anti-climatic resolution.
  It's just one colossal editing sin. Even the ending song isn't edited in properly - they just cut off the last scene!
  Also, why are all the characters voiced over? It's weird and jarring! I understand that has to happen sometimes if the sound quality wasn't great, but like, the voices weren't synced to the footage properly. Maybe it was just last-minute laziness? I don't even know.
  I hate all the little inconsistencies in character writing. The biggest of these, I intend to delve into in depth during the second part, but it's worth mentioning here. It's like the writers don't understand Tsukushi, because Shancai makes no sense. Ever. It's just one of the numerous ways in which the writing team completely fail to convince me that they understand young-adults or how to write them. I suppose I shouldn't completely trust Netflix subtitles, which they tend to over-generalise or translate too literally. Regardless, I have to say that the dialogue here is terrible. People don't speak like this, especially the teenagers that Meteor Garden is targeting. It's kind of insulting?
Essentially, Meteor Garden is the same old story, but with none of the charm that made it famous. I'm infuriated that this shamelessly rides of the coat-tails of better versions. I've never seen a Hana Yori Dango adaptation that was perfect - most of them aren't even that great - but even Korean Boys Over Flowers is better than this! Come on! That's such a low bar, show!

(I'll back some other time this month with part two.)