Have you watched The Silent Sea yet? Now out on Netflix, The Silent Sea is the first Korean drama to be set on the moon and it is amazing! If you haven’t heard of “the sea of tranquility” or “the silent sea” yet, here’s a quick backstory: in 1969, Apollo 11 first landed on the moon, and it was the silent sea that welcomed its first humans to walk on the surface.
In the new Netflix series, The Silent Sea, the Korean Space and Aeronautics Administration built the Balhae Lunar Research Station to learn more about the moon. The minute the trailer for The Silent Sea was released, KDrama fans couldn’t wait to watch it. After all, the story aside, it also stars big names like Gong Yoo and Bae Donna.
Photo from Netflix
As Korea’s first sci-fi mystery thriller series, The Silent Sea has not only perfectly captured the huge and desolate, vast moon; but it really gives us an intuition that something intriguing, mysterious, and amazing is about to happen. Did you know that the series is actually based on a short film that the director, Choi Hang-yong, actually made for school?
“The Silent Sea is actually based on my graduation work,” he shares. “When I was back in school, immediately before graduation, I really wanted to create something that was true to my passion – something that I really wanted to create. There were a lot of movies that depict outer space, but not something that was literally and physically on the moon. I wanted to create a story with the backdrop being the surface of the moon. During my research, I found out that even though the moon is the closest to us, there’s not much that has been revealed to us. And that’s how I came about creating the story about the moon.”
Photo from Netflix
Actor Jung Woo-sung, who serves as Executive Producer of The Silent Sea, shares that he saw the short film and was immediately mesmerized by it. “The setup of a story really makes or breaks the entire film, and I just fell in love with this very unique setup,” he shares. “While there are a lot of sci-fi films out there, we really didn’t think to create something like that of our own in Korea. In this very smartly-created setup, I felt like we could really create something special here.”
Writer Park Eun-kyo admits that it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, though. “I had the opportunity to take a look at the script for the short film,” she shares. “It’s quite a challenge to take on a sci-fi film even if it’s a very large-scale one. And so, the fact that Director Choi was wanting to do that as part of his graduation piece… it was just amazing, very ambitious. And it really spurred curiosity.” She adds that the script was really well-written and gripping, so she took on the challenge with the motivation to create something special.
Photo by Han Sejun | Netflix
It’s such an inspiration to learn that The Silent Sea started out from a short film and is now a new Netflix series! Director Choi says that he had hoped and believed that they could tell a bigger story compared to his short film. “In the short film, we talk about only what happens in the station,” he shares. “But with it becoming a series, we were able to depict what happened on Earth, how the other people were living. It’s no longer just a story about the expedition team but about survival and mankind and how their lives ended up being. It is now a larger story.”
Watch The Silent Sea on Netflix now.
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