Season 2 is a letdown due to its altered environment, excessive number of uninteresting people, mediocre monsters, questionable backstory, and Hans Zimmer-esque soundtrack.
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Lead cast: Song Kang, Lee Jin-wook, Go Min-si, Lee Si-young, Jung Jin-young
Bigger does not always mean better. This proverb applies to a lot of things in life, including oversized sequels to popular culture hits.
One example of this is the voluminous and disorganized second season of Sweet Home, which seemed to have learned all the wrong things from the popularity of its first season.
The characters in it left a lasting impression and contributed to the rise to fame of actors such Song Kang, Park Gyu-young, Go Min-si, and Lee Do-hyun.
Equally memorable were its colourful, gooey and bizarre monsters, several of which were vividly brought to life through tactile special effects.
The Green Home survivors have been forced back into the open among a plethora of unremarkable new individuals since Sweet Home has returned. This time, they are up against legions of hideous virtual rock creatures that resemble copies of one another created by background AI.
Sweet Home 2 opens with Cha Hyun-su (Song Kang) in arrest and being taken to an army base to be experimented on, directly continuing from the events of season 1.
In a shot from "Sweet Home" season 2, Lee Jin-wook plays Pyeon Sang-wook, who aids Cha Hyun-su in escaping custody. Image: Netflix/Kim Jeong-won
While arriving there, he is helped by Pyeon Sang-wook (Lee Jin-wook) to escape. Even though Sang-wook was killed in the previous season, his body was taken over by an adversarial monster who possesses the same capacity to actively control monster powers as Hyun-su. Even after they succeed in getting away, they go on to the base.
The remaining survivors, which include Yoon Ji-su (Park Gyu-young) and Lee Eun-yu (Go Min-si), are sent to a camp for refugees where they must deal with soldiers who are easily provoked. A soldier with a conscience named Park Chan-young (Jung Jin-young) saves them, and the group moves to a new camp at a baseball stadium.
The bold members of the Crow Platoon, under the direction of the square-jawed Tak In-hwan (Yu Oh-seong), are among the other new characters. Kim Young-hoo (Kim Mu-yeol), the second-in-command, is loud and believes that his superior's activities put the platoon in needless risk.
In this image from "Sweet Home" season 2, Lee Si-young plays Seo Yi-kyung, a pregnant lady longing to find her fiancé Nam Sang-won. Image: Netflix/Kim Jeong-won
Meanwhile, the pregnant Seo Yi-kyung (Lee Si-young) is also heading to the army base, where she hopes to locate her fiancé.
Even though Sweet Home was a high-octane, big-budget series, one of its main advantages was its small locations. The cramped area made for cramped and suspenseful set pieces, and the pressure-cooker atmosphere they created produced fantastic tension amongst the trapped people.
Other notable examples of Korean stories that succeeded by confining their plots to a single building are the drama Happiness and the movie Concrete Utopia.
Sweet Home's setting, in addition to its captivating topics and exhilarating techniques, assisted in disguising the concept's shortcomings. We marveled at the creature's design and were enthralled with the thought of humans becoming monsters out of their personal troubles, but the less we knew about this world's hazy mythology, the better.
The mythology has become meaningless in the open world's apocalyptic anarchy. The program becomes more and more confused, losing sight of its central theme—that of people being consumed by their inner monsters—the more it attempts to explain itself, frequently through the meanderings of insane scientist Dr. Lim (Oh Jung-se).
Sweet Home 2 launches headlong into its main set pieces, but during vehicle races through a post-apocalyptic Seoul, these are dominated by stodgy computer effects.
Despite the digital blur, the first few episodes have some charming elements. However, things rapidly get worse as the plot restarts after a time lapse that happens after episode three.
In episode four, a plethora of new characters all of a sudden arise; none of them are compelling, and many of them are irritating. The remaining original characters plod through their tattered stories, lost in the shuffle.
The most significant new character is that portrayed by Kim Si-a, who is basically a recast of her Luna role from The Silent Sea, when she played an unusual semi-monster.
In a shot from "Sweet Home" season 2, Go Min-si plays Lee Eun-yu, who is transferred to a refugee camp where she must deal with trigger-happy soldiers. Image: Netflix/Kim Jeong-won
The program delves farther into its perplexing mythology without providing viewers with any compelling narrative threads to hold on to. It's rarely evident where or why we're heading, and the main query that quickly becomes entrenched in our thoughts is, "Why bother?"
Slow motion and blatant ripoffs of Hans Zimmer songs from movies like Interstellar and Dune punctuate Sweet Home 2's rambling action sequences and clumsy efforts at epic moments that follow the meandering pathways of its protagonists.
While these episodes are billed as season 2, strictly speaking they are only the first part. Sweet Home 3, already shot and currently in post-production, will follow in summer 2024.
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