Jung_E (now on Netflix) is the new film from director Yeon Sang-ho, who made a name for himself outside his native Korea with 2016 zombie action movie Train to Busan. As he offered a new angle on a familiar subgenre with Busan, he surely hopes to do the same for artificial intelligence science-fiction (AI-SCI-FI?!?) with his latest work, which is set in a sort-of-post-apocalyptic dystopia where robots fight wars for us, and the side with the best AI sure seems ripe for victory. The movie is also notable for being the final role of Korean film star Kang Soo-yeon, who sadly passed away in 2022 at age 55 after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage.
JUNG_E: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: IN A WORLD where severe climate change has forced humanity to mostly abandon Earth for the Moon; where subsequent civil war has raged for decades; where artificial intelligence is a primary component of war technology; where human brains can be uploaded from diseased bodies to new ones and if you have enough money you can enjoy a terrific Type A existence, or a so-so Type B, or possibly a horrific, but no-cost Type C where your consciousness is under the control of corporations and shit; where people take ethics tests to determine that they’re indeed human and not AI – in this world, a woman leaps around a bona-fide Dystopian Hell of a set piece, fighting robots, some more diabolically advanced in their ability to withstand bullets and such. She is the famed kickass warrior Yun Jung-yi (Kim Hyun-joo), but she really isn’t Yun Jung-yi – she’s Jung_E, a clone of Yun Jung-yi, and she keeps failing the same battle simulation. The simulation reinvents the very scene of her defeat many years prior, which left her body in a coma, the contents of her brain as the key element of weapons-development research firm Kronoid and her daughter kind of almost orphaned.
As plot would have it, Jung-yi’s daughter Yun Seo-hyun (Kang Soo-yeon) is a chief developer on the project, a situation that screams CONFLICT OF INTEREST, but maybe universal ethical concerns will evolve between now and 2194. But let’s not get hung up on logic, because that’s no fun at all. The Jung_E project just isn’t making progress, and Seo-hyun and her annoying obnoxious boss Kim Sang-hoon (Ryu Kyung-soo) is feeling the heat from executives and war generals, thus making him even more annoying and obnoxious. He’s kind of amoral too, more concerned with keeping the project afloat and therefore maintaining his job status and pleasing the Chairman (Lee Dong-hee), and less concerned with the very real pain he inflicts on his AI subjects, and is absolutely the type of person we’d like to see rendered asunder by a beam from a futuristic sci-fi laser weapon. So, just like your boss, then, right?
Among all the talky yibber-yabber about the project and the dense expositional context surrounding it, we get a flashback to when Seo-hyun was young and ill and seeing for the last time her mother, decked all out in her battle armor and whatnot, because as soon as her daughter goes under the knife for her cancer, she’ll venture forth to get herself all but killed by nasty clankbots. Where Sang-hoon is a blabbering doofus, Seo-hyun says very little, keeping it all inside, especially when another failed simulation results in some unusual brain activity in Jung_E. UNIDENTIFIED AREA, it reads. What could UNIDENTIFIED AREA be? Could UNIDENTIFIED AREA be… love? No spoilers man, no spoilers!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Too many: Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix, Edge of Tomorrow, The Terminator and RoboCop, with bits of After Yang, WALL-E and Blade Runner.
Performance Worth Watching: Kang sometimes seems handcuffed by an underdeveloped, overplotted screenplay, but nonetheless drives the film with a thoughtful performance.
Memorable Dialogue: The Chairman proves that some ethical concerns are as fraught in the future as they are now: “I, too, was obsessed with brain replication. Rich people like me find the most interest in such things.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Jung_E couches an emotional, psychological drama – how Seo-hyun is essentially trapped in amber because she’s forced to relive her mother’s “death” over and over and over again – within the high-concept fodder of semi-plausible futuristic sci-fi. You sense Yeon’s pitch might’ve been, “It’s got action AND ideas!” But he fulfills only the minimum of that promise, and the end result is destined to blend into the glut of similarly middling genre fodder (Oblivion, Gemini Manand a handful of lesser Philip K. Dick adaptations come to mind).
There’s plenty of talent here – Kang’s substantial screen presence, Ryu’s clownishness and Yeon’s directorial skill should be enough to sustain our interest. The screenplay, however, leaves the project leaning on a shoddy foundation. All the talk of civil war, space colonies and climate disaster doesn’t inform the story as much as it hangs in the background like a curtain colored an indistinct hue of dystopian-beige. We don’t get much of a sense of Seo-hyun’s character outside of one-note longing and melancholy – does she like to read or cook, does she have a cat or a dog, has she ever been in love, do cats and dogs even exist in this timeline, etc.? We have little inkling – and she rarely has anything interesting to say. Although Kang finds a bit of substance in the character’s penchant for blank, contemplative silence, Seo-hyun is ultimately little more than a thin cipher.
Rather, the film’s liveliness derives from its visuals, Yeon directing sequences with an artful and dynamic hand informed by video-game action (yes, that’s a compliment). There’s grace to the choreography despite a heavy reliance on CGI. It’s Yeon’s big-idea conceptual bric-a-brac that never finds fertile soil, and feels like the usual pondering upon the existential quandaries of AI until a big third-act action sequence finds the principals holding robots by their throats – is it just me or is choking a robot a fool’s errand – or hanging on for dear life as train speeds precariously on a track. Jung_E’s greatest failing is how common it is. Memories may last forever in this world of replacement bodies and brain cloning, but the movie doesn’t offer us much worth remembering.
Our Call: Jung_E flat-out doesn’t deliver the existential sci-fi goods. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.