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Sly Korean action satire will reward the patient viewer

Jung_E (98 mins) Directed by Yeon Sang-ho Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett

★★★1⁄2

It will take you about seven minutes to work out that Jung_E is not absolutely the worst load of old rubbish you will see this year.

Which is just as well, because I don’t know if I could have made it to the eight-minute mark without some reassurance that director Yeon Sang-ho knew how bad his film was looking until that point.

Yeon has the legendary Train to Busan on his CV, as well as Peninsula, that film’s serviceable sequel. He began his career as an animator, which was making sense in the opening minutes of Jung_E. Because, oh boy, this film was looking a lot like a grievously bad digital effects showcase as it opened.

But, then – minor spoiler – Yeon pulls the curtain back and shows us that the obvious digital effects and derivative designs were exactly what he had in mind.

And that all we have been watching is a training simulation for mechanical AI soldiers.

And that the AI who is called Jung_E, the one we have been watching, is built around the mind of a legendary mercenary named Jung yi, who was perhaps killed, decades earlier.

With a civil war raging in space between human settlements – and the Earth mostly uninhabitable because we were such absolute asshats in the 21st century that we thought money was worth more than air and water – Jung_E seems set to be a mostly entertaining and heroically unoriginal thrash at a whole bunch of ideas that numerous films have done better.

Maybe the most fun you’ll have watching Jung_E is spotting the films that Yeon and his crew have borrowed ideas and designs from.

If you combine this with a drinking game and a bottle of real liquor, you’ll be in for a short night.

Without even trying, I spotted The Terminator, Elysium, ExMachina, dollops of RoboCop and Universal Soldier, and elements of set design from all of those films and more.

It is disappointing to realise that our film-makers, even the ones working outside Hollywood, have agreed what the background architecture and technology of the next few centuries will look like – and we very seldom see a vision of the future that doesn’t look very similar to a dozen other sciencefiction movies. And yet, Jung_E is not a poor film.

The scientist racing to bring Jung yi (Kim Hyun-joo) back to life as an AI is her own daughter, played by the late South Korean star Kang Soo-yeon, in her final role. And immediately a more interesting and poignant dynamic is introduced to the film than the sobriquet ‘‘sci-fi action movie’’ usually suggests.

In fact, perhaps all of that overfamiliar backdrop and worldbuilding is only Yeon’s way of lulling us into thinking we are watching a genre actioner, when in fact Jung-E is a sly satire of a class war and the attitudes that led to an environmental catastrophe.

And a commentary on the ways that parents hand down their best – and their worst – to their children. You know, just like Yeon did in Train to Busan.

Jung_E is now available to stream on Netflix.

Entertainment

en-nz

2023-01-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

2023-01-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/282291029368211

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