After Yang * * *

Apparently this film has had quite a profound effect on some people, causing them to reconsider the value of life and the existence of God etc.   I am afraid I did not enjoy such an epiphany.  Nevertheless I did not feel I had wasted my money or my time. 

It's another AI film, set in the future, with robots or simulants or whatever they are going to call them.  Doesn't anybody ever stop to consider why, why in a crowded world where population is a concern, why would they make more people?  And what's the point in having something that looks and acts just like us?  If you think it through for a few minutes, simulants are a really dumb idea.  But lets' put that aside.

Before Yang became After Yang
Yang is a really nice simulant.  A handsome young Chinese man.  He comfortably fits in with a family that is already diverse, with a white Dad, a black Mum and a little Chinese girl who they have adopted.  Not being wealthy (Dad owns a specialist tea shop), they bought Yang second hand.

We get the impression they bought Yang as a companion for the little girl.  Yang teaches her about her own heritage.

Yang breaks down (well, he was made in China, so what do you expect?). He is unconscious all the time.  The little girl is distressed. Dad takes Yang to a non-genuine repairman who finds a strange chip in Yang and believes it to be spyware, but further investigation reveals the chip to be something else.  The Museum of Artificial Humans get pretty interested in him.  In the meantime, Dad starts looking at the memories held within the chip. Soon he is wondering if love is  possible with AI beings? He sees people from Yang's past. He also learns from Yang's memory other things about life. But at this stage I found it all a bit untidy and unpersuasive rather than thought provoking. "Without nothing, there cannot be something". (Yeah, we know that).

It looks beautiful though and suggests a nice future where we live in Japanese style houses and get around in the back of comfortable driverless cars, watch TV with special glasses and everything is nice and quiet. 

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