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Still from Jung_E.
Photo: Netflix
In a post-apocalyptic near-future, a researcher at an AI lab leads the effort to end a civil war by cloning the brain of a heroic soldier - her mother.
Are you still human in an artificial body? A question that has been asked many times in the sci-fi genre, technology can feel like it's moving at a pace our biological brains can barely keep up with, and we might lose some rights along the way. This is the core theme of the Korean Netflix film Jung_E, written and directed by Yeon Sang-ho from Train to Busan and Hellbound. His filmography set this film up with high expectations of emotional depth and tension paired with excellent action choreography. Unfortunately, it was a forgettable lacklustre film that kept the story too small within its bigger world.
The film sets itself up as an action-packed feature where you're expecting to see more elements of the war and the opposing sides, but instead, the story traps itself within the confines of a mother-daughter relationship as the daughter struggles between ensuring her mother's legacy lives on and the torturous experimentation the company Kronoid puts her clones through. As the audience, you struggle to connect with these characters on a deeper level, moving more as a slow-paced drama until it suddenly becomes the action you signed up for right at the end.
It was a struggle to stay engaged, and all you wanted to do was venture out of this bubble the scientist created for herself and see the rest of this war-torn universe, how the normal people are living and why exactly this combat AI is so important to the war effort. If they were a little vaguer on the wider universe and had less exposition in the beginning, perhaps the focus on the mother-daughter relationship would have been better situated and the audience less distracted. I understand what the director was trying to do, as he's usually a master at inserting powerful, passionate relationship dynamics within fantastical situations. In Jung-E, he struggled to create a link between the emotional connections and the bigger picture of what cloning human brains as AI means for a society that sells identities on the cheap.
Another feature that dragged the film down was the cast's performance, headed up by the late and great Kang Soo-yeon, who died last year before the film's release. Her character was clearly supposed to come across as detached from the people around her, but Soo-yeon took it too far, detaching herself entirely from the audience as well. When she finally breaks her emotional wells, pushed to the brink by callous capitalism, you just feel emotionally unengaged. This indifference is paired with an annoyance for the antagonist, the obnoxious lab director played by Ryu Kyung-soo. Also hailing from Hellbound, Kyung-soo camped it up too hard, flailing all over the place with no firm direction on which kind of maniacal villain he would be. It felt like he cycled through each idea to see what would stick, but it became just a mess of a performance.
The only performance I did enjoy was from Kim Hyun-joo, who plays the titular Yun Jung-yi, aka Jung_E. A great physical actor, she had more gravitas in her more dramatic scenes as well and was the only one holding the story together. Unfortunately, her humanity was eventually also stripped at the end, and you lost that tenuous emotional connection you might have had almost instantly, leaving little impact as the film draws to a close.
For a Sang-ho feature, Jung_E was quite disappointing, a forgettable sci-fi with almost-there CGI (a case of 'pick-and-choose' hero moments with a minimal budget) where the director's heart wasn't really in it. I hope it's not a peek into what to expect for the second season of Hellbound, but hopefully, this was just a one-time miss for a great director and writer that many people will forget about.
WATCH THE TRAILER HERE:
