After Yang
Director: Kogonada
Year Released: 2021
Rating: 0.0
In some futuristic sci-fi scenario, tea merchant Jake (Colin Farrell) - who's married to Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) - was able to purchase a cyborg named Yang (Justin H. Min) to care for their (adopted?) daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) to teach her about Chinese history but he malfunctions and they're unable to properly repair him. As if the central concept isn't flimsy enough (it's based on a short story by Alexander Weinstein), Kogonada once again shows he doesn't know how to properly build up a scene, write meaningful dialogue or develop characters, so it turns into this faux-poetic "meditation" on artificial intelligence ... or something: Jake spends plenty of time trying to find a girl named Ada (Haley Lu Richardson) to "prove" that perhaps Yang was capable of "human" feelings (it goes nowhere with this, either). But what I really want to know is if Yang was also teaching Mika about the following: the Xinjiang internment camps (and other human rights abuses), the "social credit" system, lack of safety measures at virology labs, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, etc.?