parker’s desk

The Wiki page for the film’s description:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_City

I can’t say I’ve been this pleas­antly sur­prised by a film in quite some time.  Granted it felt some­what low bud­get and was far from perfect…but when you flip a movie on think­ing it’s going to be mind­less action it’s sur­pris­ing when it isn’t!  I’m devel­op­ing quite the love for South Korean cin­ema (if you haven’t, you must see “Lady Vengeance”).

The basic story goes some­thing like this…it’s the year 2080, I assume you’re in South Korea, and robots that look/act per­fectly human (“cyborgs”) are preva­lent in soci­ety.  The one catch is they all have a shelf life of only three years, which is never fully explained as to why though it felt pretty clear to me it was to keep con­tin­ued demand for pur­chas­ing new mod­els.  The MP offi­cers (mil­i­tary police?) hunt down combat-trained cyborgs and ter­mi­nate them, our main char­ac­ter R being one of said mem­bers along with his friend and supe­rior offi­cer Noma.  R has fallen in love with a cyborg, Ria, and she hap­pens to be expir­ing in a few days.  Expiration’s almost like accel­er­ated Alzheimer’s dis­ease, their mem­ory quickly becom­ing cor­rupt and basic func­tions fail­ing as they near their inevitable death.

The setup doesn’t make it sound all that inter­est­ing, but sev­eral things stand out very quickly that caught me off guard.  One, the futur­is­tic city is fairly believable…there were only a cou­ple of cases where it was painfully obvi­ous some­thing was fake, and even then that was more because I was look­ing for it than any­thing.  The char­ac­ters all feel very much real and thought out, be it R’s con­flict with him­self over choos­ing his cyborg love (which is a rela­tion­ship por­trayed as real love and not some kind of sexbot) or Noma’s own strug­gle with ful­fill­ing his duties as an offi­cer and help­ing his friend.  R has obvi­ously fallen very far from where he once was as he’s taken to steal­ing and sell­ing items on the black mar­ket to fund research being con­ducted that could tran­fer Ria’s con­scious­ness to another body (thus sav­ing her life). The sci­en­tist con­duct­ing the research, Dr. Giro, how­ever turns out not to be quite so hon­est and eager to help R as you would think which serves as a nice twist later on when you find out exactly why that is.

I wasn’t very fond of R’s char­ac­ter and found him to be more pathetic than any­thing, but that was what I actu­ally loved about the film.  He had great faults, and it made it inter­est­ing to watch them unfold as well as con­sid­er­ing the con­tro­ver­sial rela­tion­ship between a human and syn­thetic being.  If any­thing, my major cri­tique of the story comes down to that one element…I think the direc­tor could have put for­ward more effort to really explore that dynamic and make Ria a stronger char­ac­ter than she was in the film (by far the sim­plest char­ac­ter in the cast).

The fight scenes were pretty sim­ple and noth­ing to write home about, but they weren’t bad enough to destroy the oth­er­wise smooth ride.

The cin­e­matog­ra­phy and light­ing worked in beau­ti­ful har­mony from start to fin­ish, with CG added to spruce the envi­ron­ment up just enough to be fath­omable rather than ridicu­lous.  The only points deducted here would be for the really, really annoy­ing (this may just be my own per­sonal taste) shaky-cam frame-dropping crap.  Pel­ham 123 did this a lot too, and it always makes me feel like my ex-wife got a hold of the cam­era (re: can’t hold it straight to save her life)…I get artis­tic takes on things, but this strobe cam­era crap dri­ves me insane and always feels very amateur.

All in all, if you want to see more of a drama than action flick and have a cou­ple of hours to kill, I’d def­i­nitely rec­om­mend it!

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