JUNG_E

 At some point in the last decade of the 20th century, many people began to wonder if they were merely robots programmed by mass media to act in certain specific ways.  If people didn't wonder about this as applied to their own actions, they ascribed robotic characteristics to others.  (For instance, in Tar, the heroine derisively calls her adversaries "robots.")  As a result, the robot movie (and its close cousin, the zombie film) is a genre of picture that is now ubiquitous.  Indeed, it seems that robot and zombie movies are the new "Westerns".  In the early sixties, every other show on TV was a Western, even though the form was falling out of favor in Hollywood -- Westerns could be cheaply made, had standardized plots, and didn't require much more than a desert and a few horses as props.  When TV-Westerns faltered, the media gave us crime shows featuring private detectives.  (These shows didn't even require horses -- fast cars would suffice.) It now seems that the prevalent genre is the robot show (with robotic, pre-programmed zombies following close behind.)  Apparently, these shows can be cheaply made as well since robots and, to a lesser extent, Zombies look more or less like ordinary folks -- robots tend to look better, at least, until they get scuffed up; zombies look worse.  The question that arises is whether these shows have progressed much beyond their most famous progenitor, Blade Runner, released in 1982.)  On the evidence of a recent South Korean example of this genre,  JUNG_E (20230, the answer is "no."

JUNG_E is a very tedious, mediocre robot flick.  The film's premise is complicated and it takes most of the picture to set up the situation.  So the movie seems to be comprised of some loud, poorly choreographed fight scenes bracketing lengthy and loquacious exposition.  The situation is that earth has flooded and humanity has gone into orbit to flee the ruined planet.  (This concept explained in some long titles is promptly abandoned and much of the movie seems to take place on Earth.)  The orbiting refuge satellites have devolved into a bloody civil war that is waged, largely, by cyborgs.  A woman-warrior named Jun has a small daughter suffering from cancer.  On the eve of her daughter's surgery, Mom goes into battle after bidding her daughter, Hsieh, farewell.  In combat, Mom is fatally wounded.  Her mind is exported from her dying body into a Class C robot. Class C means that the resurrected mind has no civil rights and can be endlessly replicated.  (Apparently,  if you have money, you can be reborn as a Class A robot with intact civil rights or, as a Class B machine with only some of your rights authorized.)  Jun has been made into an army of murderous Jun's by the evil Kronoid Corporation and its equally vicious Chairman.  Years later, the Kronoid Corp. is experimenting to improve its war robot models.  Poor Jun is placed in simulations where she is systematically mutilated -- the idea is to turn her pain into wrath (imagined to be a yellow color in the brain).  In an implausible coincidence, Jun's daughter, Hsieh, now fully grown is working on this project and, therefore, involved in torturing her own mother -- they shoot the robot mom in the leg repeatedly, make her battle a cyborg dog who hurls thunderbolts at her, and cut off one of her arms with a circular saw.  Of course, robot Jun feels this pain intensely as they ratchet up the misery to push her into some kind of Berserker frenzy.  The civil war has come to an end and the Defense industry (Kronoid in particular) is now engaged in radical reductions-in-force.  To add insult to injury, Jun is going to be converted into either a sex model robot or, possibly, a domestic worker -- from murdering enemies, she's going to be demoted to washing dishes and making beds.  A particularly vile boss from the Kronoid firm, a psycho named Sang-Hoon (a robot himself) takes pleasure in torturing Jun.  Ultimately, Hsieh, who has nothing to lose (her cancer has come back) puts Mom into Berserker mode so that she can take revenge on her enemies.  The movie ends with a noisy and completely witless fight between Jun and Sang-Hoon on a sort of box-car running like an inverted monorail out of the city and into some implausibly green, verdant and beautiful mountain wilderness (I thought the Earth had been destroyed). 

The movie is terrible.  Furthermore, it's pointlessly sadistic.  The picture has a kind of Black Mirror vibe about it -- Black Mirror also exploited sadism and suffering in most of its episodes.  At the end of the movie, Jun has been reincarnated into a sleek, Art Deco robot, who isn't much of an advance on the robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the robot-Maria with her wink and leer, invented for the screen almost 100 years ago.  (Lang's robot is much, much better than the robots in this movie.)  The fight scenes are staged in trashy bluish-grey junk heaps that seem to have been imported into the movie from old computer games.  The entire show is humorless, nasty, and dull.  It also cheats on its climax.  At one point, we see a small army of Jun robots and, of course, we're primed to believe these automatons will take a horrific revenge on the evil minions of Kronoid (most of whom are 'bots themselves).  But, as  in Westworld, the audience is deprived of the pleasure of seeing the robots take their revenge on their tormentors.  The army of Jun warriors doesn't get unleashed and the movie ends with a low-budget and nitwitted battle on the equivalent of a subway car.  (I would have like to see the Jun robots, revamped as sex models, fuck their enemies to death -- now, that would be a spectacle worth paying to see.)   This mess is directed by Yeong Sang-ho -- he made the Zombie apocalypse film Train to Busan (2010) that I mildly admired.