My mother in superpowered metallic form...
would be terrifying
dir: Yeon Sang-ho
2023
I should lie and say this is the South Korean sequel to Pixar’s WALL-E, whereby a plucky robot tries to save humanity from itself by killing a bunch of robots, and maybe some people too, if it has to, but that’s not going to convince anyone of anything, and could get Disney’s lawyers involved.
Jung_E is a strange science fiction flick from South Korea, but it is interesting. Well, it was mostly interesting, and only to me. And probably to the people who made it.
Despite being sci fi, despite starting with lots of action, this is not an action flick. Sorry to disappoint. It starts with intense action, and then really doesn’t have further action until the last fifteen or so minutes of the flick. So don’t go in expecting action, is all I’m saying. This is not an action flick.
Truth be told I’m not sure what you would call it instead. Maybe a techno drama, maybe a daughter / mother guilt fest. Set some time in the future, the planet has become uninhabitable due to climate change, and these shelters have been constructed off world to house humanity’s survivors. A number of these shelters unite, break away, and declare war on the others, presumably to fight over the scant resources left or about which god is the real one or over wearing masks or something equally stupid. A really cool mercenary called Captain Yun (Kim Hyun-joo) leads these forces against a bunch of robots, but seems to get shot just as she’s about to complete some important mission.
But she’s confused, because after she’s been shot, and she looks down at her fingers, there’s metal and wires where she was expecting blood and bone.
It turns out that this battle is a simulation, that she is a constructed, robotic being, and that she has been cursed to relive her final mission as some kind of South Korean hell-afterlife.
Not quite. The ‘real’ Captain Yun was seriously wounded and lapsed into a coma, where she has stayed for decades. Some jerks have made a copy of her memories, of her mind, and because she was a famous captain, have both turned her into some kind of superheroic symbol, but also are trying to create an AI-robotic soldier for mass production that will get all the funding and win the war against…whoever it is they’re fighting.
For reasons that make no practical sense, the company, Kronoid, has pinned all its hopes and dreams on making a version of the Captain Yun AI that somehow completes that fateful final mission in simulation. If it can survive and complete that mission, then it somehow means that the AI version is better(?) than the original, and wouldn’t fail such a mission again? But also, that mission…it was 35 years ago. They don’t still need to complete that exact mission with those exact enemies, do they?
That’s…bonkers. She pauses at the same time whenever they run the simulation, and gets shot, but they never know why. Run a program the same way a lot of times and you’re pretty much going to get the same outcome, unless you change the parameters that influence the outcome. But if they don’t know why she gets distracted at that moment, it’s going to happen forever.
By some strange coincidence, Captain Yun’s actual biological daughter Seo-yuon (Kang Soo-yeon) is the head scientist at Kronoid trying to turn her mother’s AI into the perfect cyborg warrior. She often interacts with and debriefs the tortured versions of her mother, destroying each ‘defective’ version before proceeding with the next version. She seems to have feelings about it, but, unlike myself, she doesn’t see this form of cloning / replication as the cruel monstrous abomination that it is.
Or maybe she does, I dunno. She mostly seems to worry that maybe her mother didn’t like her that much when she was a kid, and fears she resented her because of the burden she represented. The heroic, climactic, catastrophic battle where she didn’t triumph; she only went on that mission because she needed to earn money to pay for the surgery for her daughter, who had a tumour in her lung.
Obviously that daughter survived. She doesn’t feel bad about the mother still being alive in a coma / suspension of some sort, although she continues to age. She doesn’t seem to feel bad about the pain these cloned versions seem to feel, or the torment they’re put through. But she is nonetheless a deeply sad individual.
Her boss Sang-hoon (Ryu Kyung-soo) is something of a, how shall I put this delicately, total fuckwit. It’s not clear how someone as young and dumb as him could be in charge of such a complicated project but, hey, most people think their managers are total fuckwits, so this at least is relatable to us techno-peasants living in the past.
Seo-yuon doesn’t much care for her boss, or seemingly for the overall program, but she does want the chance to find out what her mother thinks / thought of her.
When the program seems destined for cancellation, when it looks like either the Captain Yun version 25 is never going to finish the simulation properly, or that the project will be abandoned or repurposed, Seo-yuon seems determined to somehow ‘free’ her mother from this indentured servitude.
That when she’s told directly, and we’re told indirectly, about how this brave new world actually operates when it comes to the ethics of what they’re doing with these duplicated, essentially cloned minds / bodies / consciousnesses: There is a legal structure to what can be done.
If you’re Type A, you are rich as rich. A new body can essentially be created for you that is effectively immortal. Your brain can be dropped straight into it, you lucky rich fuck. Society will treat you like you’re the same, original, worthy rich person that you were before. Not only do you have the same rights as before, if anything, you have more rights now.
If you are Type B, you have some money, but not enough. They can make an okay body for you, but you won’t be considered to have the same rights as regular humans, and your mind and memories essentially become corporate property in many but not all circumstances.
And then there’s Type C: they’ll clone you infinitely, and they own you, and they can make whatever copies they want, they can make you do whatever they want, and despite being conscious etc, you will be legally seen as having as many rights as a toaster.
Captain Yun never even signed up for all this, she was never given the choice: her own mum, Seo-yuon’s grandmother, only agreed to all of this because corporate interests pretty much forced her, and that’s how legally they can do whatever the fuck they want to all these versions of Captain Yun.
Even, to Seo-yuon’s absolute horror, if they decide to make sex dolls instead of soldiers out of her mum, well, it’s all legal and above board, and no-one can stop them.
Well, no-one except Captain Yun, maybe?
Look, I’ll be the first to admit that this doesn’t really clarify as to how self-aware these AI versions of Captain Yun are, and what it means in terms of human / digital consciousness. Though ethical considerations and questions are raised, they’re not really answered in any satisfying way, or in a way that’s satisfying enough. But at least it raises some questions, and doesn’t answer them, but then tries to craft an ending that has some kind of meaning, as mawkish and as sentimental as that may seem.
It is manipulative and sentimental (the mother / daughter relationship), but without that this would be a cold exercise in watching one set of CGI robots fighting a bunch of other CGI robots, which isn’t artful or impressive enough to be compelling. There is some stuff here that almost implies they haven’t really come that far from I, Robot, which is from nearly 20 years ago, either in thinking about these questions of AIs and robots and what that could do to the remaining humans on the planet, or how to depict these kinds of conflicts in an action flick that doesn’t have that much action in it.
But I found it really interesting. I especially thought the actor playing Captain Yun in all her forms did phenomenally, as the character with the least amount of knowledge as to what was going on, but the only one we want to survive, maybe. And the daughter as well has some believable misgivings about what she’s been doing for decades, that maybe she can finally make up for.
And saddest of all, Kang Soo-yeon, the actress playing the daughter, I’m not making this up, died soon after filming on this movie finished up, in early 2022, and this was her last role.
As final roles go, this is almost a poignant note to go out on, for reasons I won’t spoil.
Jung-E doesn’t give much hope for humanity, which, in the future, seems like it will still be cruel, selfish and greedy, but it does give some hope for the AI robot overlords that will inevitably replace us.
7 times I hope they’ll be kinder than we were to the planet out of 10
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“Listen closely. Be free.” - Jung_E
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