~ LIGHT UP THE SKY ~

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY

On Wednesday October 14^th, 2020 Netflix released an 80 minutes long documentary about the worldwide-known K-pop girl group Blackpink.

Blackpink is a four-membered girl group who debuted on August 8^th, 2016 under YG entertainment. The members are (from the oldest to the youngest) Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé and Lisa. In 2019, they went on their very first world tour that consisted of multiple legs: the Asian leg (Manila, Bangkok, Jakarta, …), the Europe leg(Paris, London, Amsterdam, …), and especially the North American leg (Rosemont, Newark, Fort Worth, ...) where they were able to perform at the Coachella festival, a whole new experience for the girls.

And although the documentary was supposed to focus on that world tour, it put the light in many other aspects of the girl’s career, especially their trainee days.

I’m going to try not to go too deep into the details first because I don’t want to spoil things, second because I’m not sure I’m allowed to. Now, I’m not a big fan of Blackpink, but I still wanted to talk about it because I found this documentary quite interesting.

The things I liked

First of all, I know this wasn’t the point of the documentary, but I did think that they would talk about scandals at some point, but THANK GOD they didn’t because god knows how many things these girls went through, and how many things this company went through in general.

Also, I was so happy to learn more about each member individually, because one of the reasons why I am not a hardcore Blink is because I didn’t really feel close to the members. I know they have a reality show that is being broadcasted but I never thought “oh, I want to know more about the members, let’s check variety shows and more content like that” because I wasn’t curious. But that documentary made me curious about them.

We learn about each member’s background, where they came from, what was their life before auditioning and becoming trainees. Then they jump to how they auditioned and how their trainee period went. The number of courses they had to take, the monthly evaluations, the elimination process, etc. Every member tells the story in their point of view and of course, every member went through different experiences and feelings before becoming a member of Blackpink. The feelings, they spent a good 20 minutes talking about how shy, exhausted, insecure, happy and excited they felt. That’s what I wanted to hear.

Second, it was nice how they presented the phenomenon of “K-pop going to America” when the Coachella segment came out. At some point Jennie said that they didn’t care to be perfect on stage but they wanted people to be curious about them, and after that performance a lot of people got curious about them indeed. They even talked about that in the first minutes of the documentary, when their producer Teddy said something along the lines of “K-pop is not pop music with just Korean lyrics otherwise every other country should be capable of doing what we do”, meaning that K-pop is not something characterized by its language, it’s something new and unique that hasn’t been done in any other country.

Last but not least, I was really happy to see some backstage moment. This is what makes an artist appear as a sincere human being. Not that they’re not sincere stage, but in what I like to call “backstage moments” they are spontaneous and truly themselves, they are Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé and Lisa, whereas on stage they are formatted to be Blackpink.

What I think could’ve been better 

I am not a filmmaker nor any kind of professional in that field, but in my opinion, the progression was a little… messy. They kept going back and forth between milestones and that bothered me a little, but that’s not a major problem and it’s only my personal opinion.   

I also wished the documentary was a bit longer. They say it’s about their world tour but at the end of the day we don’t see that much concert footage or backstage footage from the tour. I also wanted to see what they do when they have some free time (I know it doesn’t happen a lot but that’s exactly the reason why).

Overall, this is what I call a well-done documentary. When you watch it, you understand the process trainees go through before becoming idols, the ups and downs they go through after debuting, and the reasons behind Blackpink’s phenomenal success. There are no unnecessary moments in it, you’ll feel captivated during the whole thing. I would definitely recommend it to anybody, whether you want to know more about the K-pop industry in general or want to become closer to these four talented girls.

That’s it! Let me know in the comments if you watched the documentary and what did you think about it. 

Love, Swan