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NATURAL
CITY
6/10
(South) Korea 2003 : MIN Byung-Chun : 112 mins
Natural City is a breezily confident cobbling-together of elements
from cultish tech-noir forebears: most obviously Blade Runner, but
with significant elements of The Matrix, Aliens and far-eastern
genre-entries such as the similarly sepia-foggy Avalon.
Catching up with it in the summer of 2004, however, it's hard not to
think of a current Hollywood variant on similar themes: Alex Proyas's I,
Robot. Except this time it's more a case of "My Robot",
as the central relationship in writer-director Min's script is between
a renegade special-forces cop known only as "R" (Yoo Ji-Tae)
and Ria (Rin Seo), an alluring "doll" cyborg whose chips are
just about to expire.
 Desperate
to somehow prolong the life of his "girlfriend",
R tracks down renegade scientist Dr Giro (Jeung Eun-Pyo) who has developed
a means of transferring the contents of an electronic "brain" such
as Ria's into a human "host". R identifies feisty street-scavenger
Cyon (Jae Un-Lee) as a suitable "container" - unsurprisingly
Cyon isn't too keen on the idea. Adding further complications is renegade
warrior-cyborg Cyper (Doo-Hong Jung), whose clandestine alliance with
Dr Giro threatens dire consequences for all...
As this synopsis
indicates, there's no shortage of "renegades" running
around in this grandiose but somewhat chaotic vision of the year
2080, yet another dystopian future dominated by nefarious, DNA-obsessed
megacorporations and policed by quasi-fascistic heavily-armed goons.
As so often with this type of picture, the dialogue tends towards the
jargon-heavy, needlessly complex end of things, and much of the narrative
remains frustratingly opaque.
But Min puts every cent of what's clearly a hefty budget up on screen,
and audaciously punctuates his numerous slam-bang action set-pieces (there's
an interminable one-on-one bloody slugfest late on) with some strikingly
lower-key scenes where melancholy emotions come to the fore. And he makes
excellent use of one particular set - a ruined 'goddess' statue perched
spectacularly high above the city - for which art-director Cho Hwa-Seong
deserves particular credit. That said, Cho's reach seems to have exceeded
his budgetary grasp - in a nice touch, the end titles feature several
of his 'concept' sketches, not all of which found their way into the
finished product.
What we do see,
however, more than makes up for the deficiencies in the plot. The most
obvious of which is the fact that Ria - around whom nearly all of R's
actions revolve - doesn't seem to possess much in the way of personality,
and it would have made more sense if he'd tried to transfer Cyon's
all-business personality into Ria's sexy body rather than the other
way around. That said, Yoo is a notably charismatic presence -
and he's much better suited by this action-man role than his smirking,
sedentary OLDBOY villain. Indeed,
so nimbly does he switch from mano-a-mano combat to romantic entanglements
and back that in an ideal world he'd surely be "natural" casting
as the next 007.
27th September,
2004
(seen 19th August : Cameo Edinburgh : press show - Edinburgh
Film Festival)
click
HERE for
our full coverage of the 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival
by Neil
Young
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