JUNG_E: Kang Soo-yeon’s Sci-Fi Swan Song Short-Circuits

Ah, the relatable motivation of trying to break your mom out of techno-purgatory so she doesn’t get converted into a sex robot.

Jung_E, a South Korean sci-fi drama on Netflix, has the clunkiest title this side of Se7en (do you pronounce the underscore? what’s going on there?) and an equally laborious plot to boot. High on its own concepts and low on excitement, Jung_E is the sort of genre exercise that would make a great short film. At feature length, though it’s only 99 minutes, Jung_E is only sporadically interesting, and it has all the momentum of an AOL dial-up.

The plot concerns a research team trying to work the kinks out of an AI combat robot, the titular JUNG_E (Kim Hyun-joo), who also happens to be project head Yun Seo-hyun’s (Kang Soo-yeon) mom. Opening title cards tell us about how climate change ravaged the Earth and mankind fled to space shelters, developed artificial intelligence and advanced robots, and then a high-tech civil war broke out. Basically, the most exciting parts of Jung_E‘s story are happening off-stage, and we’re stuck with the scientists trying to build a better soldier.

Welcome To The 22nd Century

Jung_E is the kind of movie that rests on its own premise and visual effects. It has a built-in appeal for Isaac Asimov junkies and fans of hard sci-fi like James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse series. Were it any better, it would be a modern cyberpunk classic alongside Blade Runner and its sequel. But the screenplay, from Sang-ho Yeon, fails to capture the world-building, depth, and inventive characters that make those stories engaging, instead front-loading the ideas and leaving little room for anything else.

At least in that department, Jung_E has ideas aplenty — and not just about AI soldiers. The script spews out concepts like smog from a 22nd-century cyberpunk smokestack: synthetic humans, consciousness uploads, and robot police are just a few of the big ideas Jung_E offers, laid upon a bedrock of extraplanetary conflict and more prescient concepts like artificial intelligence and climate change. In spreading its praxis so thin, Jung_E ultimately winds up saying very little about any of it. The ending is a 20-minute action scene and a shrug, a statement against the futuristic slavery of keeping clones as servants or sex robots. Like, cool? Thanks? Good to know that keeping human clones as combat drones is unethical… I guess I’ll keep that in mind?

It’s upsetting to see Jung_E, a 2023 South Korean project that wears its astronomical budget on its sleeve, replicate thin variations of the ideas that even underwhelming movies from 20 years ago, like I, Robot, covered so much more thoroughly. The film’s characters wade through a pastiche of tired dystopian tropes, from underwater cities to giant robots collecting garbage. Outside of their chrome labs and hundred-story office buildings, the world’s gone to shit, but that’s not really the world the movie cares about. It’s a post-apocalyptic jung_e out there.

From Zombies To Cyberpunk Action

Writer-director Sang-ho Yeon is best known for his exciting South Korean zombie horror Train to Busan. He did a guns-blazing zombie action heist film, Peninsula, a few years later, too. Yeon began his career writing and directing aeni before transitioning to live-action with Train to Busan. That background in animation no doubt helped him realize Jung_E, which some critics have complained looks too fake, like the whole film is drenched in overly complicated CGI.

The aesthetic might not be for everyone, but under the right circumstances, that artificial, chrome sheen could have worked for Jung_E. The issue is that it’s never addressed in the narrative or given a deeper reason for being, so the whole film is simply computer-generated robots, bullet time, and futuristic monorails against computer-generated backgrounds. As a result, outside of the performances of the talented cast, little of Jung_E feels real. Given that its actors are mostly just asked to sit at computers and click buttons, there’s not a whole lot to grab onto. Jung_E reminds me of the Star Wars prequels — notoriously shot in a warehouse-like set on green-screen backgrounds — in which Anakin Skywalker might chop up and eat a pear in Episode II but you seriously doubt whether, or set, Hayden Christensen is actually cutting and eating anything. In and of themselves, however, the special effects for Jung_E are terrific. The story they service, less so.

Yeon’s Train to Busan, for me, always seemed like it got more acclaim than it deserved. The film moves quickly and has its fair share of neat set-pieces and horror, but the characters are little more than zombie chow with one-line backstories, and Yeon as a director asks the villain of the cast, Kim Eui-sung as a weaselly corporate executive, to play to the rafters, as though to replace substantive characterization with frantic noise and sniveling line deliveries. Jung_E continues the trend of “action first, character never” of Train to Busan, enlisting a small but likable enough cast to liven up some pretty dull material.

Hats off to Kim Hyun-joo for taking a difficult role, that of the AI soldier JUNG_E, and pouring empathy, grace, and raw determination into it. Kim flourishes most in her action scenes, bringing fluid physicality to her fights with completely CG adversaries. Lee Dong-Hee performs his lone scene as the company chairman with relish and steely corporate glee. Ryu Kyung-Soo draws the short straw here, enlisted to play the villain of the piece. His lab director has all the bottomless apathy of the corporate executive from Train to Busan, made all the more irritating by Yeon writing his character as a joke-deploying psychopathic goofball. It’s like if Michael Scott were on speed and really got a kick out of murder. And he gets a gun. And he knows martial arts, because why not? Ryu is appropriately animated in a thankless but showy role, but the character’s twee jokes and shout-filled delivery gets old fast, and he’s basically the third player in a three-man show.

Kang Dynasty

The soul of the film is Kang Soo-yeon’s team leader, Yun Seo-hyun, enlisted to train an AI robot double of her mother in combat scenarios. Kang has a long history in South Korean cinema with little international breakout, so Jung_E at the very least should bring her increased recognition outside of her native country. She previously starred in a trio of acclaimed Korean dramas — The Surrogate Woman in 1987, Come Come Come Upward in 1989 (for which she shaved her head on-screen as a Buddhist monk), and 1990’s All That Falls Has Wings — and also went on to co-direct the Busan International Film Festival. I wonder what a veteran dramatic actress like Kang had to make of Jung_E’s production. I imagine it was a lot of blue screen and tennis balls on strings. “This tennis ball is supposed to be a robot,” that sort of thing.

Jung_E is Kang’s final film, as the actress died from cardiac arrest in May 2022. The role was something of a comeback for her, as Kang hadn’t appeared in Korean cinema for 12 years. (Though it’s a Netflix original, the film seems to have had a limited theatrical run in Korea, around the one-year anniversary of Kang’s death.)

Kang approaches the role curiously, with none of the gusto of her co-stars. Her deep eyes, pursed lips, and poised posture carry a maternal air of authority, even as she doesn’t have much agency in her own story. It’s one of those sci-fi dystopia performances, like Brad Pitt in Ad Astra and Ryan Gosling in Blade Runner 2049, where the character has routine examinations to make sure they’re not acting too human. In Jung_E, they’re called “ethics tests,” to make sure Yun is OK with torturing a robot clone of her mother. These ethics tests are character-killers. Of Pitt, Gosling, and Kang, only Gosling actually manages to evolve beyond his character’s cold, emotionless demeanor into something more interesting. Kang, despite her best efforts, is a core of intelligence, heart, and dignity trapped inside a statue. She’s been cast in a film where she plays second banana to a robot soldier. It might be the most expensive production Kang’s been a part of, and it inevitably introduced a great South Korean actress to moviegoers who wouldn’t have otherwise heard of her (like me), but it’s an unfortunately thin role to have as a swan song.

Conclusion: Jung_E

I wish director Yeon shared his subject’s obsession. Yun is possessed by her job, driven to perfect this AI soldier at all costs, as a way of honoring her mother’s legacy. Jung_E is a mindless film that neglects its soul in favor of metal-scraping, robot-smashing action. It squanders a great lead performer in what unfortunately wound up being her final film role, and most damningly, it’s just boring. One of the film’s main characters is revealed in the third act to be a robot who’s convinced that he’s human. Jung_E is a special effects reel convinced that it’s a film.

Jung_E is now streaming on Netflix.