While the ever-present spectre of A.I. looms over us, one bright side that’s come from all this global anxiety seems to be that any filmmaker dabbling in science fiction now have endless amounts of juicy plots and scenarios with which to poke and prod the nature of humanity. Stepping up to the plate this time is Yeon Sang-ho, director of the rightly adored, instant zombie classic: Train To Busan, who turns his knack for propulsive action and overwhelming emotion to the realms of dystopian futures and robot soldiers with Jung_E, a meditation on both motherhood and motherboards that’s carried out in the director’s distinctively slick style.
However, the movie drops onto Netflix amid something of a crowded market, with such filmmakers as Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Alex Proyas and Neill Blomkamp (to name but a few) already treading familiar ground, can Jung_E manage to stand out in the crowd?
In the 22nd century, mankind has finally left an uninhabitable Earth in its rear view by shifting a large section of its populace to live on space stations. However, three of the eight stations eventually decide to name themselves the Adrian Republic and suddenly start to attack the other stations and remaining settlements back on Earth proving that there’s no situation that humans can fuck up more with their ingrained war mongering.
This brings us to Captain Yun Jung-yi, a soldier turned mercenary who takes numerous dangerous missions against the Adrian Republic chiefly to pay for the treatments her daughter, Yun Seo-Hyun, desperately needs to cure her of a lung tumour. However, the day the little girl is due to have her operation, Jung-yi fails in a particularly brutal and important mission that leaves her in a coma and it’s something that’s played on Seo-hyun’s mind ever since.
Thirty five years later, Seo-hyun’s mother issues have taken an epic turn when we find her as the team leader for a project run by the Kronoid corporation that’s cloned Jung-yi’s brain in order to make the perfect, A.I. soldier. Seo-hyun’s motives are embarassly clear as she wants her mother to be remembered as the hero she was instead of being judged by the failure of her last mission, but after running simulation and simulation, JUNG_E simply can’t pass the final test needed to give the project the green light from a cadre of scowling generals.
The continuing failure not only is frustrating Kim Sang-Hoon, the project’s over emotional project director, but also means that Seo-hyun’s time is running out faster than she’d like due to her tumour returning and leaving her with only months to live. Can she find out what’s causing her “mother” to fail before her body fails on her?
Ever since the superlative Train To Busan put him instantly on the map, Yeon Sang-ho has been supplying film fans with a variety of genre friendly projects such as Peninsula and Hellbound that keeps the director’s love of high-energy, high-concept action present and correct – but while his live action debut frenziedly rewrote the book on zombie flicks, his latest offering has something of a tough challenge to master. Simply put, every single cinematic auteur that’s ever dipped so much as a pinky toe into the realms of sci-fi have been picking at the concept of A.I. ever since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis hit theaters back in 1927 and so Jung_E has something of an uphill battle to win when it comes to standing out.
Sang-ho’s attempt to counteract this is to twin the notion of artificial intelligence with that of bond between a mother and daughter as Kang Soo-yeon’s constantly sad-eyed scientist struggles to put respect back onto her mother’s legacy by using a military program to keep her memory alive, even if it’s just as a soldier drone. This leads to a conflict of interest between our lead and her bosses as the movie uses this to explore themes about corporations literally using a person’s identity for whatever they want simply because they own it. While there’s still something of a divide between a comatose soldier being mass produced to fight a war and a CGI image of Audrey Hepburn selling chocolate, the point is still there and a disturbing subplot about Kronoid looking to utilise Jung_E as a sex bot in order to make up their loses horribly prescient. Elsewhere, Sang-ho explores other intriguing concepts such as characters who have no clue that they’re robots at all and even the notion that you can have your identity scanned into a robot body when you die, but your subsequent human rights depend on how expensive the model you buy is and you wish he had more room to explore these further.
However, Sang-ho seems somewhat constrained by his ideas and is limited to talking about such things rather than showing them. For example, we only get to explore the civil through simulations that see Jung_E single handedly square off with a battalion of robots that come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Aside from that, Jung_E spends most of its run time focusing on numerous conversations set almost entirely within laboratories that give us a metric ton of cool tech to pour over, but doesn’t let the movie stretch its legs when it obviously wants to.
However, knowing full well that he’s not going to get the scope of an A.I. Artificial Intelligence or a Chappie, Sang-ho keeps things focused on Seo-hyun’s desperately personal mission and its carried over beautifully mainly due to an emotional performance from Kang Soo-yeon that’s made all the more poignant by the fact that she tragically died of a cerebral hemorrhage before the movie was finally released.
Not only does the emotional aspects of the movie connect well – especially with a tear duct assaulting moment when Jung_E reveals to her “daughter” the exact details concerning her final mission – but Sang-ho finally gets to take the stabilizers off in the final reel when the action finally has space to step up a notch or two. While some of it admittedly feels highly reminiscent of 2004s I, Robot and the climax takes place on – where else – a train, it still moves at a blistering pace, ending an interesting film on a bittersweet high.
However, for all of its varied ideas, polished visuals and emotion, Jung_E doesn’t quite do enough to stand out from a market that’s only going to get all the more cluttered the more time goes on and instead only proves to be a nice diversion in the same way the majority of Netflix movies end up being.
How ironic – an A.I. movie smothered by an algorithm…
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