What to give your robot mother on Mother’s Day?
Jung_E, the big budget 2023 scifi movie, suggests a robot mother will appreciate freedom. Baring that, a novel wheel-leg hybrid mechanism.
An upcoming Science Robotics article will discuss how the robot science, particularly the hybrid wheel-leg arrangement used in the real-life DRC-HUBO robot that won the DARPA Robotics Challenge, is particuarly interesting from a robotics viewpoint.
But how does Jung_E stack up as a movie? Much better than the reviews suggest.
In Jung_E, the last memories of war hero Captain Jung Yi have been preserved and 35 years later instantiated in a nearly exact physical replication. Her death in battle orphaned her young daughter, Seo-hyun. Seo-hyun has grown up to be a leading roboticist, ostensibly tasked to find why Jung Yi failed in her last mission in order to create a more perfect combat robot that will win the war, but secretly is trying to reconnect with the mother she dearly loves but barely remembers. Jung_E does not remember her life before the last battle- or does she? As bonus for roboticists, the emotional drama is accompanied by a range of morphologically interesting combat robots and plot points probing ethics (or the lack of them) in robotics.
Why the hate for the movie? I suspect the biggest source stems from the movie trying to be more emo like Blade Runner and edgy ethically like Ex Machina or HBO Westworld rather than maintain a constant action of Transformers or Pacific Rim.
The is a lot of action, but there is a lot of recycling from other movies- Visually, about the only thing shot they missed was a Forbidden World Krell/Interior of the Death Star shot of some sort of command center.
There is a The Edge of Tomorrow/All You Need is Kill Groundhog Day repetition of a key mission, in this case against a bunch of superior robots.
There is a “find the hidden robot in the army of motionless robots in formation scene” almost identical to the shot in from I, Robot
The ubiquitous drop ship launching robots scene last seen in The Mandalorian
Androids are tested using a variation of he Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner
Seo-hyun has a male boss that makes the one in M3GAN look reasonable
Plus the HBO Westworld ability to stop a robot and swap them between sentience and de facto teleoperation
So yes, there is some recycling- but at least it’s from good movies and the visual effects are well produced.