TL;DR – This is an interesting premise that is well acted, but the glacial pace holds it back when there is such a specific counting clock driving all the motivations.  

Disclosure – I paid for the Netflix service that viewed this series.

Warning – Contains scenes that may cause distress.

Goodbye Earth Review –

In the past couple of years, there have been two huge surprises. The first was how emotional Greenland turned out to be, and the second was how impactful All of Us Are Dead turned out to be. When I heard that there was a series that could be the Venn diagram between these two, well, I had to check it out. In today’s review, we will be looking at the first six episodes to see if it captures us.    

So to set the scene, we opened in an abandoned construction site for apartments, with cranes left standing, swaying in the wind mid-load, as if society shifted in an instant. In this world, a young girl lives alone on the top floor in a society that is starting to collapse around them because on February the 22^nd, 2026, an asteroid Dina is going to crash into Earth, striking the Korean Peninsula, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. There are just 201 days before the end of most life on Earth. While anyone who can get out of Asia is in the city of Woongcheon, Korea, at Cheondong Middle School, people are trying to go on. Now from here, we will be looking at the series as a whole, so there may be [SPOILERS] ahead.  

Right from the start, they always hold on to these moments that pull on every part of you as you watch a society desperately trying to hold itself together to get as many people to safety as possible while every impulse is tearing itself apart. In the first episode alone, some moments are profoundly confronting. All of this is juxtaposed with happy flashbacks to a time before they knew the asteroid was coming and most of a school class was murdered in shipping containers. Indeed, that first episode shows just what the stakes are as a world slowly rips apart.

What I liked about the series is the overlapping themes that are on display at the end of the world. You have competing sources of information trying to fill the void left by the arbitration of responsibility of those in charge. Cults are rising, children are being ripped off the streets, criminals are above the law, and conspiracies abound. There is this constant juxtaposition between those trying to hold on and those trying to rip things apart. The scandal-ridden YouTube star trying to get his family out, but he is an idiot that gave money to scam artists. The young priest Woo Seong-Jae (Jeon Sung-woo) tries to keep his church together after the main priest is arrested and disappeared. The parents who lost it all, and the teacher, Jin Se-kyung (Ahn Eun-jin), trying to hold onto what is left.

While the premise and characters are reasonable, it does not mess around with its themes that are as blunt as a piece of 2-by-4 to the head, and it leans into some powerful symbology. I mean, I dare you not to feel as people were sorting through the empty shoes. Unfortunately, the pace very much drags on. I am six episodes in, and we only just had our first big-time jump to 170 days to go. There is this disconnect between the opening titles that burn through the countdown and the reality of what we get in the show. Maybe things start accelerating from here, but so far, we have been on a leisurely Sunday drive that does not quite gel with the coming apocalypse.

Along with this, there is a lot of jumping back and forth along the timeline, and they are not always clear about where you currently are. There were a couple of times when I was caught off-guard by a time shift that I didn’t know we were in. The melodrama is a bit higher than I personally like, but it is also in keeping with the style of the show. While there are these frustrations, thankfully, the cast is stacked with Korean luminaries that make those scenes work. There has also clearly been a lot of work put into creating the vibe of this world through the sets and the slowly crumbling world.

In the end, do we recommend Goodbye Earth? Well, I think the most significant determining factor as to whether you will be along for the ride or not is how you work well with a prolonged burn. For me personally, I don’t find myself in a big rush to see just how it will all pan out, but I would like to see eventually if that asteroid will even hit or not. There is a lot here that is good, but it just didn’t capture me the way that I had hoped.  

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

Have you seen Goodbye Earth yet ?, let us know what you thought in the comments below, feel free to share this review on any of the social medias and you can follow us Here. Check out all our past reviews and articles Here, and have a happy day.    

Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Goodbye Earth
Directed by – Kim Jin Min
Written by – Jung Sung Joo
Based On – The Fool At the End of the World by Kōtarō Isaka
Production/Distribution Companies – IMTV, Studio S & Netflix
Starring – Ahn Eun-jin, Yoo Ah-in, Jeon Sung-woo & Kim Yoon-hye with Bomin Kim, Kang-Hoon Kim, Yeo-jin Kim, Kim Kang-hoon, Young-woong Kim, Kim Seok-woo, Park Hyuk-kwon, Yoon Seo-ah, Kim Young-ok, Han Song-Hee, Park Ho-san, Song Ji Hyuk, Baek Suk-Kwang, Shin Dam-Soo, Jo Si Yeon, Baek Ji-won, Cha Hwa-yeon, Lee Si-Hoon & Park Joo-hee  
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