JUNG_E is a Korean science fiction flick (on Netflix) that borrows heavily from better movies. It is, itself, a decent enough movie with a promising emotional core but with dodgy visual effects and only ok action. Nothing particularly remarkable about it, even if I do credit it for having some ambition.

The flick is about a combat veteran who died fighting a futuristic civil war. Her mind is patterned and reproduced to run through the simulated battle she died in over and over, trying to replicate and improve her skill for implant into robotic soldiers. But doubts about the ethics of replicating an unwilling mind arise.

Shades of Robocop, AI films, and time loop-ish type movies are all over this one. That doesn’t make it good or bad, but we gotta acknowledge we’re not treading in unique territory here. It all comes down to how they use the ideas… and they aren’t badly used, just kind of surface-level at times. There are some surprisingly good emotional moments near the third act that kind of impressed me.

The actual action scenes are a little hit-or-miss, possibly due to the visual effects being very hit-or-miss. Almost all the action scene are tied to CGI robot constructs in CGI environments and sometimes they aren’t up to modern standards. Environments are sometimes off as well. It sure feels like they were trying, but maybe the FX team didn’t have the budget or the raw talent to get every shot right.

Overall though, this isn’t a bad movie, but it’s surely a movie lacking where it’s striving to be great. I appreciate the ethical questions and at least one of the relationships, but it wasn’t really enough to get the movie across the finish line. Not bad… but not particularly good either.

Score: 72