Jung_E movie review: Train to Busan director's new sci-fi thriller is deeply emotional and exciting

Yeon Sang-ho's 2016 film Train to Busan was something of a revelation. For me, it made zombie movies interesting again. And instead of the winking, self-aware humour that had saturated most Hollywood zombie flicks, it had an earnestness and an emotional core that American filmmakers probably deemed too cheesy. Sang-ho brings something similar to Jung_E, a science fiction action thriller (with cyberpunk elements) that is now streaming now on Netflix. The film is not exactly original in any sense of the word, as it does take ideas from the genre's classics (Philip K. Dick's works and its Ridley Scott-directedadaptation 'Blade Runner' appear to be the major inspirations). But I've grown more forgiving of derivative works of late.

Provided, of course, they do something interesting with those ideas, instead of merely aping ideas in the absence of anything original. Also written by Yeon Sang-ho, Jung_E manages to craft a well-realised, if bleak, future for the planet. But what sold the movie for me was the emotionally resonant story centring on a mother-and-daughter relationship. Like many sci-fi stories, Jung_E presents a grim vision of the future. It's 2194, the earth was ravaged by climate change and the disasters arising out of it to the point that it was no longer inhabitable. Humans survived by building shelters in space. But humans being humans, they begin waging a war among themselves even as their radius of influence shrinks significantly.

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We follow Yoon Seo-hyun (Kang Soo-yeon), an engineer who works in a company that has developed AI combat technology. She is currently involved in a project that involves her mother. While legally dead for four decades, her mother Jung_E (Kim Hyun-joo) was a legendary mercenary who died in an engagement that, had she won, would have ended the war. Her brain is kept alive so a perfect clone from her body can be built, which would not share her shortcomings, if any. Seo-hyun and her team send those clones to a simulation that recreates that last engagement, and thus far, the result is the same: Jung_E loses every time. The task is to help her survive the simulation, so the 'replicant' (or clone) can be sent to the frontlines and thus end the war.

Yoon Seo-hyun was a little girl when her mother died, and shared a deeply loving relationship with her mother. The reason Jung_E became a warrior was to earn enough money so that her daughter could go undergo surgery to remove her tumour. The day she died was the day Yoon Seo-hyun underwent surgery and recovered.

Now, her company is being downsized as ending the war is no longer a priority. Peace has been established through a treaty. And Jung_E's fame as a war hero is going to be used for more unsavoury purposes. Since the version of the replicant she agreed to allows the company to use her consciousness and model as they see fit, they want her likeness and her mind to be used as something akin to sex dolls — for the demographic that harbours fantasies of having sex with a war hero. Yoon Seo-hyun, who has seen her mother fall to enemy bullets more than she can count, draws the line there.

I mentioned above how Jung_E, the film that is, creates an authentic-seeming vision of the future, which is indeed dark, but also to a person from an age in which AI is increasingly being commercialised without any oversight, almost inevitable. Judging by how fast technology advances these days, it is not hard to imagine consciousness being harnessed as a thing and transferred from human bodies to androids in a hundred or so years. We might speak about morals these days, but this is the Information Age, and information is widely accessible. And even today, there have been renewed attempts to curb the passage of information by paranoid governments, mirroring the dictatorships of 20th century.

Jung_E captures that future we are likely heading towards. In the dawn of advanced and presumably sentient AI, human beings are treated like commodities for corporates — even more so than they are in the 21st century. In the film, the more well-off can afford to be practically immortal as they can transfer their minds to androids and continue living forever. Their replicants also have the same human rights. The people on the lower rungs of this frightening class system can also survive, but their minds and their likenesses are no longer their own and can be exploited indefinitely. They have to essentially forfeit their rights.

Jung_E also boasts of several surprises. Since replicants are so lifelike and carry the original human body's consciousness, it is hard to tell— à la 'Blade Runner' just who is a human, and who is not. The production quality is quite good. The visual effects and set design are as good as the best big-budget Hollywood sci-fi has to offer. The action scenes are excellent, and that was something I was not expecting. Make sure you watch the movie on a large-screen TV. That is the next best thing toa theatre, where this film really needed to be. The CGI does get dodgy once in a while, but that is easy to miss. Visually, too, the film is more than satisfying.

But it is Yoon Seo-hyun and Jung_E 's relationship that serves as the beating heart of this excellent sci-fi film. I am yearning for a rewatch already. Don't miss Jung_E.