Android, my android

Byung-chun Min’s Natural City is both shockingly new and maddeningly derivative. At once, you can see its antecedents: Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, The Matrix, and Battlestar Galactica to name four off the top of my head, and a slew of other South Korean movies I have viewed recently. Much of this has been done and seen before, yet there is something fresh and compelling about the story of R and Ria the droid who loves him.

The plot twist that propels Natural City is the shockingly short lifespan of the androids, both military cyborgs and pleasure dolls: they only live for three years. There is even an aural countdown as repeated public service announcements remind the droid owners of their planned obsolescence and of how to dispose of them. Further, the droids themselves wind down as they near their end.

This is a wrenching reality for the rogue military policeman known only as R ((Ji-tae Yu, Won-mo in Lady Vengeance and Won-jin Lee in Old Boy). He has fallen for a doll who dances at a night club owned by a mobster with whom R has done dirty business. Ria ((Rin Seo), nearing her expiration date, no longer has the coordination to dance and R talks the club owner into giving her to him in exchange for chips R illegally liberates from defunct cyborgs to sell on the black market. It is the first of many bad deals R will make in order to save his doll.

R’s desire to rescue Ria dovetails with the plans of a renegade cyborg named Cypher (Jeong Doo-Hong) and the diabolical plans of the enigmatic Dr. Giro, all of which revolve around a gamine-eyed sex worker/fortune teller named Cyon (Jae-un Lee).

The post war world of Natural City is beautifully rendered, with a gleaming new metropolis co-existing next to the partially submerged old city (the movie was filmed in Busan, Korea and in Thailand). There are Fifth Element-esque flying cars and Blade Runner-esque barrios and noodle bars. The wire work of the choreographed fight scenes are impressive but lack a certain wow factor because it has all been seen before. Some visceral excitement is goosed from the brutal firefights between the black clad military police and the black battle droids but it is often difficult to tell who is shooting who.

While Natural City is worth seeing, it is, on final reckoning, unsatisfying. A much better movie seems to be lurking in the sum of its uneven and diverse parts.

~(no)rave!