On ‘After Yang’: Finally an AI Film That Isn’t About What It Means to Be Human (Commentary)
31.03.2022 - 19:29
/ thewrap.com
Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for “After Yang.”One evening in a not-too-distant future, a humanoid robot named Yang (Justin H. Min) suddenly shuts down. Mika (Emma Malea Tjandrawidjaja), the young girl he has practically raised, is devastated.
Her chronically busy parents, Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) are more irritated than heartbroken by the loss of their live-in babysitter. When Jake goes to get Yang repaired, he discovers a portal into his memories – and realizes he’s been looking at everything the wrong way.“After Yang,” the second film by “Columbus” writer-director Kogonada, can be hard to pin down.
It falls somewhere between science fiction and speculative fiction, but there are no heroes or villains, space battles or swamp creatures. It’s a family drama, but almost all of the plot plays out internally.
What is clear is that it stands apart from other films about artificial intelligence, opening the door for some much-needed change to the genre.Film has always been used to explore man’s relationship to technology, with killer robots and man-made monsters standing in for our fear that the things we create will eventually outpace or turn against us. With their human-like minds and sometimes human appearances, AI are particularly ripe for creative contemplation.
We’re drawn to stories that take place at the lowest point of the uncanny valley, where the difference between man and machine is razor-thin. If we can figure out what they’re not, maybe we can figure out who we are.In other words, these films typically strive to answer the question: What does it mean to be human?Sure enough, if you Google “After Yang meaning,” the internet will tell you it’s about “what it means to be
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