The name of Yeon Sang-ho It may not say anything to many, but surely things will change if I tell you that it is the director of ‘Train to Busan’. Lately he has been more focused on television – he was in charge, for example, of the staging of all the episodes of the first season ‘Rumbo al infierno’ -, but now he returns to the cinema with ‘Jung_E’.
Written and directed by Sang-ho, ‘Jung_E’ is a film that fully enters into the juicy theme of artificial intelligence, also being Netflix’s first great commitment to science fiction in 2023. Of course, this is a work that bets more on the emotional by placing the story of a mother and her daughter at the forefront of everything. The result is an acceptable tape but that never finishes squeezing the ingredients it uses.
a bleak future
‘Jung_E’ transports us to the distant future, more specifically to the year 2194, in which artificial intelligence is being used to try to create the perfect soldier. What complicates everything is that the memories of a war heroine are being used for this and that her daughter is one of the scientists in charge of the project.
This stimulating starting point serves as a way for Sang-ho to present us with a future that sounds more likely than any of us would like to admit, since there are already certain questionable aspects of today’s society that could lead to something like this. Out there he has a lot of cattle to catch the viewer’s attention, also raising some moral dilemmas that add more sauce to the movie.
However, everything related to science fiction interests Sang-ho more as a basis to explore the relationship between the characters played by Kang Soo-yeon and Kim Hyun-joo, with the particularity that ‘Jung_E’ was the great return to the cinema of the first after more than a decade away from the big screen. And I say it was because in the end it has become his posthumous film, since he died shortly after finishing filming after suffering a cardiac arrest when he was barely 55 years old.
‘Jung_E’ never quite takes off
There should be nothing wrong with the film focusing on its more emotional side, as Sang-ho takes it easy to try to give more depth to that relationship in order to try to make the climax have enough dramatic force to make it feel like the necessary and adequate climax for ‘Jung_E’. The problem is in the details, both in that great central plot and in the way it affects the rest.
On the one hand, Sang-ho presents a very attractive universe but at the moment of truth he forgets to develop it in every way. In spatial terms, the vast majority of the film’s footage takes place in enclosed spaces that tend to be more generic than desirable. That only changes in its powerful prologue and when it puts all the meat on the grill during its spectacular last act.
This limitation also applies to getting to know that sinister future better, since the ideas are there -as in relation to the three kinds of artificial intelligence to which people can aspire-, but it’s more notes that are piling up instead of something to fully enter. We have a good example of this when the protagonist discovers something striking about a co-worker. Sang-ho shows it and soon forgets about it to move on to the next thing.
It is true that this is no longer a direct consequence of the fact that the emotional is situated above the science fiction componentbut it is that there it is more conventional than desirable, which will lead many to feel somewhat frustrated for giving secondary weight to what is undoubtedly the real hook to attract the attention of the public from the outset.
I remember, for example, that last year ‘Saying Goodbye to Yang’ arrived, where his way of addressing the emotional impact of the inevitable loss of the family robot was fascinating at times. Here you opt for a somewhat more traditional and content approach that you can already see how it will develop. It is not that it does anything wrong, but it does lose impact capacity and ends up staying a bit in no man’s land. That also applies to the work of its two leads, convincing but lackluster.
In short
‘Jung_E’ is a science fiction film that bets on the emotional component above all else and the strength that it manages to transmit to each viewer will mainly depend on whether they enjoy it more or less. For me I can’t say it’s, but it’s not good either, and it’s a shame, because it does use good ingredients.
In Espinof: