What If Ex Machina was written by hipsters?

Name: "After Yang" (2022) - Movie Review
Item: After Yang
Author: @shortshots

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2022's After Yang is about a futuristic tea-shop owner (Colin Ferrell) coping with the loss and learning the secret life of his family's long-time android Yang (Justin M. Min). I can't watch an android movie without comparing it to 2014's Ex Machina so this movie felt like a monotonous hipster stab at the genre that felt more concerned about cultural and social identity, rather than tackling the moral and practical aspects of science fiction.

From the get-go, it's very obvious that a large chunk of the budget went into crafting an organic, nature-oriented, wood-focused backdrop and wardrobe. This is a movie about rich futuristic vegan hipsters who claim not to fetishize Asian culture but wear modernized Qing-Dynasty garb, sit on the floor and eat ramen at noodle cafes, adopt a Chinese daughter, and purchase an android of Chinese features and knowledge. I imagine it as a secretly dystopian, solar-punk "utopia."

The main conflict of the movie is that the family android dies and their adopted daughter is distraught because her "big brother" and the only "family member" who looked like her is effectively "dead." Unfortunately, while this pain is understandable due to its alienating nature, most of the film focuses on the father played by Colin Ferrell, Jake, who learns that broken androids are returned to the manufacturer who harvest all its memories--which is a privacy breach. Imagine if your phone was constantly recording to you and every time you upgraded to the next iPhone, Apple studied thousands of hours of your life in order to better advertise to you? Incredibly creepy but strangely not the focus of After Yang.

Instead the film chooses to focus on Jake going through Yang's memories to see into his family life and also Yang's personal life. Being a stereotypically detached father figure, he learns that Yang has greatly helped with teaching Jake's daughter Mika about her identity as a Chinese person but also as a member of the family through the gardening concept of "grafting" which involves implanting a branch from one tree into a different tree to produce a hybrid fruit. He also learns of a Yang's semi-romantic relationship with a clone, Ada, of Yang's second owner who died in a car crash. These are touching moments but the emotional drama of the movie never seems to break the surface and you feel submerged in a lukewarm fever-dream for most of its running time.

Returning back to my mention of judging all android movies against 2014's Ex Machina, I couldn't help but see that After Yang doesn't ask any important questions about the nature of dangerous technology, the validity of android personalities, or just bring anything new to the sci-fi genre other than a eco-friendly hipster bore-fest. In Ex Machina, the film points out that human experience is understood as nuanced -- physical survival has been replaced with existential survival, the need to live being replaced by the why to live and the many avenues that is tackled by -- but for Ex Machina's android there is one objective: escape to society from an underground island-dungeon by outsmarting the immoral genius creator and the moral idiot visitor. Personality is not the core of an android's being, it is feathers, a means to an end, and such analysis is not at all attempted by After Yang.

It's a light-hearted movie about loss that could be set anywhere and doesn't really have anything to do with androids or the future. After Yang isn't exactly absolute trash but my final grade for this movie would have to be:

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