[Review] [Music Video] KARA – “Pandora”

Written by: Budy

Recently, KARA made a comeback with their 5th mini-album, ‘Pandora‘, and released a sparkly new video to accompany it.

The video, leaving aside all possible ‘interpretations’ of its meaning (don’t even try it, Kamilias), is the everywhere-to-be-seen dance in a box music video. This review could end right here, if I wanted it to.

But since KARA’s good looks have successfully allowed them to release this kind of video time and time again with no signs of boredom from their fans (specifically the male ones), its interesting to point out how this video portrays that this year.

“Pandora” starts with some really good shots of what we later find out to be the girls’ individual rooms. These first 20 seconds or so are beautifully shot, but they would actually work in a production where we could refer to the environment they’re in to fully understand, for instance, why the heck it’s raining inside a roofed parking lot. But as we have all kinds of nothing going on, it becomes an odd attempt to make it look like it’s something different or that there may be a storyline to follow.

Thus, we move to the individual rooms: two parking lots, one alley, some kind of futuristic interrogation room, and, what it seems to me, the interior of a washing machine. Then we get shared rooms á la SuJu boxes, where the only artistic additives are the crazy blinding lights.

***At this point i’d like to take a few lines for a tiny rant: cars inside a closed room. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve seen them. Yet, they keep appearing.

HOW DID YOU EVEN GET THERE, REALLY.

Throughout this music video, what we don’t have is a real point. The loss of focus, the constant cuts, even though they’re clean and nicely done, make no sense to me. Then again, it seems its only purpose is to show the girls’ assets, and then some, but I’d like to know more. It loses me, really.

Despite that, though, something I really enjoyed was the dancing. It is, in my opinion, KARA’s best choreography to date and it really pleases me to see Jiyoung all lady-fied while performing (even if i’m disliking the Taemin-like metamorphosis, with her having short hair then long hair then short hair again). The choreography itself has much more flow and complexity than their previous efforts, and the eye candy was less “in your face” and much more suggestive with an elegance plus.

Besides that, I honestly think they wasted an opportunity to make a really interesting MV. The idea of the girls being the five women impersonation of Pandora, guarding the famous box, could have led to surprising ends. I can guess this song brought the “Sailor Moon nostalgia” to the anime enthusiasts, and a big frustration for the fap-material diggers.

What do you think?

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