JUNG_E review: Train to Busan director serves up stellar sci-fi on Netflix

From the very beginning, this new Netflix movie is a must-see. Busan: TrainAnd Peninsula Yeon Sangho is a writer who brings to mind sci-fi films. American viewers will find the opening scenes and some other moments of this film to be at least familiar. JUNG_EYou will be able to recall films like Alita: Battle Angel, ElysiumNeill Blomkamp photographs, together with The Phantom MenaceTerminator: The sequels of the Terminator from later periods SalvationThe Alex Proyas version is also available. I am Robot.

It’s not that these seeming homages represent a stunningly curated, uniformly great set of sci-fi classics. AlitaIt is amazing and Phantom MenaceThis is an underappreciated resource. Terminator: Salvation It is at its best, a bit misguided. Collectively, these films may not even be what actually inspired Yeon: He’s from South Korea and he began his career in animation, so he may well have a whole other set of influences in mind. But modern sci-fi movies are so quick to pull from the same sources — Blade RunnerThe original Star WarsAnd Alien — that any film even suggesting a different lineage is an attention-grabber.

JUNG_EIt is also very grabby, because the movie opens with a great action scene in which Yun Jung-yi (Kim Hyunjoo), fights through a group of robot soldiers. It becomes increasingly videogame-like as the scene progresses. The movie pulls back to reveal that its heroine occupies a virtual space. Following a large battle, Jungyi was in a coma. Now, scientists working for a large corporation are putting AI-cloned versions of her through that same battle, hoping some version will figure out how to survive it — and become the great warrior needed to win the ongoing civil war.

There’s a lot of lore to get through, right from the top: The movie is set at the end of the 22nd century. Earth is uninhabitable, so humanity has moved to space, where they’ve split into two factions engaged in a seemingly infinite armed conflict. The movie, which is mostly shot in and around laboratory facilities, shows only a glimpse of the conflict. The chief researcher on the AI project is Yun Seo-hyun (Kang Soo-youn), whose tight-lipped professionalism belies the fact that she’s also Jung-yi’s daughter. Her taciturnity contrasts substantially with the manic, sometimes goofy Sang-hoon (Ryu Kyung-soo), a team leader focused more on money, pleasing his corporate bosses, and, as he puts it, “showmanship.”

JUNG_E It opens with the exciting battle scene. Then it closes with a better, bigger action sequence. There are some cartoony visual effects, but they work well. Yet it’s not exactly an action movie. In the long stretch between instances of mayhem, it goes through a lot of world-building, contemplative drama, and some plot twists that intentionally undermine both the characters’ and the audience’s expectations about where the story might logically be headed.

Knowing about the movie’s odd structure in advance might spoil some sense of discovery in an admirably unpredictable movie. On the other side, it’s possible for less patient viewers to assume, at the half-way mark, that Yeon has lost his momentum and strayed too far. Sometimes it’s frustrating when the story cuts away from Jung-yi; whether in human form in flashbacks or robot form in the present, she’s the movie’s most charismatic character, while her grown daughter Seo-hyun is, by design, less immediately expressive. Kang spends time bringing out Seohyun’s emotions.

Photo by WellGo USA

Sadly, this is Kang’s unexpected farewell performance. After completing the film, Kang, who was a Korean star for many decades, passed away. The film’s sense of loss, in which the subject considers whether or not mimicry of human brains constitutes its own existence, is very appropriate. It also explores what that type of superficial extension to traditional forms of consciousness might mean. It has its humorous moments. JUNG_E’As the film progresses, there are a few moments of sorrow.

The movie’s return to an even more dramatic climax feels like an authentic hybrid and not a case of mild whiplash. When the movie shows a swarm of robots with generically human faces, they don’t just resemble the robot designs from the 2004I RobotYeon seems to have made an odder and more personal companion than that compromise movie. JUNG_E There are many parts available, as well as occasional green-screen effects. Both the robots it builds and its humans move with surprising grace.

JUNG_E Netflix streaming available now