After Yang

For centuries, I'm sure many have looked at their pets or their babies and let out a sigh of stress, wondering what was going on in their brains. In the case of After Yang, I felt myself asking the same thing, but in this case it was an android. What really is going on inside his brain, what is he really thinking about? The titular character Yang (Justin H. Min) is a robotic teenager whom a couple named Jake and Kyra (played by Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith, respectively) bought secondhand from a certified reseller called Second Siblings. Second Siblings is a company that specializes in selling robotic children that can serve as Chinese siblings to adoptees who were born in China. This is great for their daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), who has grown up with an older brother who never bullies her and instead only plays with her and offers her "Chinese fun facts" to help her appreciate her Chinese heritage. She calls him gēge (older brother), and he calls her mèimei (younger sister). All is well until Yang suddenly malfunctions and doesn't operate anymore. Mika is devastated, and Jake struggles to get him fixed. 

Almost immediately, a variety of ethical puzzles might be bouncing around your head as you watch the film. For example, could someone really know what Yang or any other android is thinking? For one, he has an awful hairstyle that I hope never catches on in the real future. Does he like it? The film hints that he has feelings and even ambitions. In one scene, he even says "I wish." So, is he programed to desire things? Additionally, I thought about things like the ethics of "owning" a synthetic android and the over-reliance of some parents on technology to keep their children occupied. I also thought about what the enormous costs of having such a robot, but this issue isn't really addressed. Jake is a small business owner selling tea (his life passion), and Kyra works in some kind of corporate job, so they're probably at least upper middle class. The year in which the film takes place is never mentioned, but maybe inflation really takes off in the future. 

One other topic that inevitably weighed on my mind as I watched it, particularly the beginning as we really see Mika miss her brother, is the issue of adopting a child from a different culture, ethnicity, or race. Over a quarter of a million Chinese children have been adopted out of China since the 1990s, many of them into families in the U.S. I was surprised the film suddenly drops this element of the story in favor of particularly less interesting topics, like Jake stressing over how to fix Yang and searching through all his memories. After Yang is a neat film, but there are better sources to understand the experiences of Chinese adoptees. All of them are documentaries, like Wo Ai Ni, Mommy, the 2010 documentary about a family in New York who adopted a girl from Hong Kong, the BBC short called Meet Me on the Bridge, about a young woman's journey back to China to meet her birth parents, and One Child Nation, about the effects of the one-child policy on China.

Beyond that, sci-fi fans will likely be thinking of previous stories they've seen on the screen, like the 2001 film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence or the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Measure of a Man," both of which explore the rights and emotional well-being of androids. In other ways, After Yang might remind some of the Black Mirror episode titled "Be Right Back" from 2013, the one in which a woman played by Hayley Atwell dates a synthetic recreation of her deceased boyfriend played by Domhnall Gleeson. All of these are probably a bit more memorable than After Yang. 

The best part of the film is its acting, the most compelling of which is Min as Yang. One of his principal tasks is to present for the audience a performance of an android unlike any they've seen before, especially because there are no other stories in which the android is an adopted son meant to keep his adopted sister close to her culture in a way her adoptive parents will be unable to. 

After Yang is a multilayered story, but one gets the impression that if writer/director Kogonada had focused on one of its layers, the film would have been more effective. It's a family drama, a work of science fiction predicting the future, an exercise in ethics, a story of adoption, a debate about data storage. It's all of theses things. But it shifts in an unpolished manner from one to the other in a way that is distracting. The family drama, for example, isn't allowed to be interesting, and it doesn't care if its audience cares or not. It tries to be all of these things at once, and it doesn't balance them well. See After Yang for its acting, and try to ignore the fact that you may have already seen similar stories that are more noteworthy.