It took a while for me to slog through the 49 episodes of Meteor Garden, the Chinese adaptation of Boys Over Flowers, and for the most part it wasn't all that bad. Instead of writing a long review I'll cover the pros and cons. Pros first:
1. Dylan Wang as the male lead character Daoming Si was an interesting casting choice. He's definitely a strong visual, but he also brought a unique interpretation to the role.
2. The wardrobe and settings departments did great work, especially with the variety of clothing and locations.
3. The love triangle between Si, Shancai and Lei worked almost as well as it did in F4 Thailand.
4. The story was even more detailed than the Japanese version.
5. The secondary romance was quite charming.
And now the Cons:
1. Shen Yue was pretty one-dimensional in portraying the lead female character Dong Shancai. She spent most of the series in a negative emotional state, which got tedious fast.
2. Whoever wrote the dialogue needs to go back to dialogue writing school.
3. The love triangle was in fact so well done it basically ruined the primary romance. I personally don't know why Shancai chose Si; she seemed like a cold fish with him from beginning to end. I'd definitely choose Lei over him.
4. The story was overplotted, repeated itself several times and contained way, way, way too many flashbacks.
5. The last episode was so muddled it was almost incomprehensible, suggesting to me that the director and the writer(s) clashed over it and came up with this as a compromise between the original source story and whatever they think an artful ending is in China.
In the end I was left feeling that you'd have to be a diehard Boys Over Flowers fan to get through the Chinese, Japanese and Korean versions. Now that I've seen them all I think the Thai adaptation is the best, and absolutely stellar compared to the others. But if you want to plow through a loooooong lesser version, Meteor Garden is available on Netflix.
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