Jung_e

  We're zero out of two on our success rate for Netflix Asian Sci-Fi extravaganzas. Jung_e is a very different proposition from Warrior of Future, though- it's meant to be a classier, more cerebral take on some pretty thorny issues, skimming a bit from a relatively new subgenre of sci-fi that mines horror from the subjective experiences of conscience uploads.

 It unfortunately fails spectacularly at grounding any of its ideas or assembling any sort of interesting argument. This is not decent sci fi, in other words, but it also fails at a more fundamental level - it's not even a compelling or interesting story. Writer/director Yeon Sang-ho (he of the really fun Train to Busan) has the bones of something worthwhile, but he seems more interested in mining cheap sentiment out the elements in play than in exploring them in any worthwhile way.

 So- what is it about? Well, it's the future, and everything's gone to shit because climate change. Humanity spread out to a space stations that immediately decided to go to space war with each other. At one point early in the war, lone mercenary/superhero soldier Captain Yun (Kim Hyun-joo) had the chance to end the war but she fucked up, so as the movie starts the war's been going on for decades.

My screencap plugin crapped out, so here's a promotional still.

 Captain Yun survived that mission, but was left in a coma. Some time later a corporation called Kronoid approached her family and got them to sign a contract for the rights to upload her brain and effectively 'own' that copy. A couple of decades later they decide to clone her conscience and have her run simulations of that final mission on her because apparently if she finishes it... something? (This is a deeply stupid movie that not only paints everything with the broadest of strokes, it also makes several YA-fiction-level conceptual leaps, so bear with me).

 They assign her daughter Seo-Hyun (Park So-yi) to run the project. Because there's no way that could cause any problems, right? In any case, Seo-Hyun is determined to restore her mother's honor in the eyes of her people, so at least there's a motivation there.
 But Kronoid is a private corporation, and they're driven by the bottom line. Also, they treat Captain Yun's cloned consciences as an object they can torture or do whatever they want to at will. So we get treated to a lot of instances of "Hey, look how horrible this obviously horrible thing is!". And the science of it... ah, hell. You get colour-coded emotions taking over percentages of the brain, it's that level of talking down to the audience. Basic; really fucking basic bullshit.

 On one hand Jung_e is trying (and failing) to juggle these high-level ideas, but it's also an action movie, so we're treated to many replays of Catain Yun's botched mission, and everything gets wrapped up in a big, explosive finale. There are a lot of fun action beats - I like the quadruped tank with wheels, or the many fun uses of a grappling hook (games have known grappling hooks are awesome since at least Bionic Commando, why's it taking movies so long to recognize this?)
 Unfortunately the action scenes, while plentiful, are not enough to save the movie. I didn't find them particularly compelling: the camera moves are energetic, but the editing is a bit choppy and everything ends up feeling a bit disjointed and drained of momentum. The budget is also not quite up to what it's trying to do- This is clear early on, whenever you get any exterior shots of a flooded city, and doubly so by the end, where the all-action climax features more CGI than anything solid. (The budget is about a third of Warrior of Future's, for reference.) 

 Don't even get me started on the deeply manipulative maudlin streak running through this thing, which is so ridiculously contrived it had me laughing out loud several times. 
 I tried to like this, I really did, but... well, there's not much here to like. Bits and pieces, like how they portray androids being shut down or how a suave dipshit talks a big game and then breaks down when he has to give a presentation. The rest is a very disappointing, boring mess.