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Going Too Far In The Future Favorite Movie Quote: "He's in love with a girl - or a doll?" While the comparisons between Natural City and Blade Runner are unavoidable, both cover different philosophical ground; where Blade Runner asks questions about what makes someone human, Natural City instead focuses on the personal questions about dealing with loss and how far is too far to save the life of someone you love. More accurately would be to call it "the Korean sequel to Blade Runner". The film opens with the heart of the story on its sleeve; R (Ji-tae Yu) sits on the digitally hallucinatory beach of a far-off world with the object of his affection, a cyborg designed for pleasure purposes - or "doll" - Ria (Rin Seo). Ria has three days to live and what time R, paradoxically a hunter of rogue cyborgs, doesn't spend trying to find a way to save her, he spends with Ria. His only hope to save her involves dealing with the unscrupulous back-alley doctor/tech, Croy (Eun-pyo Jeong), and sacrificing innocent, beautiful street urchin Cyon (Jae-un Lee). R's supervisor and friend Noma (Chang Yun), knows what R's trying to do and why, but need R's help to chase down and destroy military cyborg Cyper (Doon-hong Jung). Natural City has a handful of decent action sequences and the production design is first rate, but the interest of the piece is the moral dilemma plaguing R as he watches his beloved Ria deteriorate into a shell of her former self (the cyborgs don't just die, but degenerate in series of lost memories and motor functions). While the movie doesn't show you much of who she once was, it very poignantly illustrates how much R loves her, from his illegal black market dealings in an effort to save her to how he spends what moments he can just being with her. I liked Natural City; I thought it was complex, thought-provoking, and a good piece of cinema - Korean or otherwise. It subtly presents a number of fascinating social questions packaged in a slick sci-fi shell, questions such as what love is and how you can twist it into something ugly by not being able to let go, questions about the value of life, friendship, and loss. The parallel between Ria's degenerative condition and that of someone who has a terminally degenerative illness is not difficult to see. Rent it or buy it; Natural City is worth the chips. email this review to a friend
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