 Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Movies We Can Learn From and we're going to learn about a specific movie called After Yang with our movie reviewer George Kasin in a moment. George Kasin, movie reviewer and architecture student, a man for all seasons, the Renaissance man, you could really appreciate this movie After Yang. What's the play on words there? Who's Yang? What happens after Yang? What are we talking about, George? We're talking about Brave New World. This movie is about when you have cyborgs or robots that are so human that have emotion, that have think, they can think, they can feel and basically this couple have bought this robot, this cyborg for their adopted daughter so she can have a companion, like this brother, an older brother, to teach her and whatever because the mother has a career and the dad has a shop and they're busy. So they bought a companion and a teacher in-house teacher for their little daughter. And she's a adorable little girl, right? And he is just brilliant, you know, and he talks all about his life, his feelings, but he doesn't talk about his former two owners. So he only talks about, you know, his own feelings and whatever. And as the show progresses, just like you like, Jake, little bits and pieces come out and eventually we see a little more about him. Yang, he is Yang. And after Yang means after he malfunctions and pretty much dies, you know, how these other people in the family are dealing with it and how they deal with our own human emotions. And it really puts us into, makes us look at ourselves. So it's a really excellent, excellent movie. And it's, as I said, sci-fi, you know, and where we're going and Brave New World, you know, for someone my age coming from when we had one ringing, dinging phones and now look where we're going. Now, I mean, I was 35 or 36 when they put a computer on my desk at my office in California. So we're really, the technology is advancing so fast. And then it also talks about, you know, corporate things. When this cyborg cannot be fixed, the company tells him, well, we'll just give you a new one. But the little girl is already attached to Yang and they don't want to know. So the father goes and tries everything he can do to get Yang fixed. But it's really complicated. It's complicated. So we can get into the details later, but I'll let you fill in whatever you want to fill in, Jay. And then we'll take it from there. Well, you kind of get into the family in this movie. You are brought into Colin Farrell, who is really excellent and who is mentioned in the movies that are winning awards these days. Yes, exactly. It's great in this movie. And he's got a wife whose name she's black. Yes, Kyra Jody Turner Smith, another well-known actress. I think she's British. A Jody Turner Smith. Yeah. And it's husband and wife and it's sometime in the future. They don't say exactly when and you get to participate with them and the child. So it's a family with a number of people in it. And the husband and wife between Farrell and Jody Turner Smith are really interesting. They both play it so well. Excellent. They're both family people. They understand each other. They have a wonderful, warm, loving relation, even though they're a multi-racial couple. And they are challenged with this problem about Yang. And you don't see any high drama or over acting here. You're just in the room with them. And you begin to understand the dynamics between the husband and the wife. And you love them both. You love them both for the relationship that they are demonstrating to you. This relationship is so sweet and pure that it's just sort of like the ideal husband and wife beyond anything you've seen in the movies. So I really liked that. I liked her. I liked her grace. She had grace. And so does Farrell. He has grace too. And they do have a few little arguments, which is what happens in marriages too. So it's very realistic, even though the relationship is really good. But I think her work and him and his, she's trying to find out what he's doing to get Yang back to life. So it's just a fascinating, fascinating thing. And then the one thing that was mentioned is even the neighbor, George, all his children are cyborgs. And then there was something about people can't have children anymore. There's some kind of a thing that couples are having difficulty having children, maybe because of nuclear war or whatever. They get into that very slightly. But it's just all these little pieces start filling, fitting together. But I couldn't agree with you more that the relationship between the husband and the wife is just really pure, really nice. And the love they have for their daughter. Oh, yeah. One thing I forgot, the reason, the way that Yang conked out, they were all in this dance thing, I think on a video, Zoom kind of video thing with these dancers, you know, leaders, and the husband, the wife, and the little girl are all dancing and Yang is dancing. And then after the people on the, you know, the leaders on the Zoom say, okay, enough, Yang keeps, keeps going and going. So they know something's wrong. And then after he keeps going, then bingo, he's out. And they go through all the machinations of the different places that, and they find out that his, the central computer is bad for Yang. And there's problems there with the central computer. So then Sarita Choudhury, Cleo, she plays the museum director or whatever, they have a museum for technosapiens. I think that's what it was. Yeah. And he was, she was terrific. Yeah, she's a good actress. Amazing. Yeah, she was, she was also a very good actress, you know, no overacting, but right in the role, right in the, in the collaborative, you know, cast. I really enjoyed that about this movie. So let's talk about, you know, Yang for a minute. Yes, that's exactly. Justin Min was very good, very flat effect. And you know, it's not easy to act so flat effect as he was acting. And he's failing. And his mind is going. He doesn't, he doesn't have the same sharpness that he was built to have, or that he had before. It's like, you know, Alzheimer's or something. It's, he's, he's not doing that well. And he's forgetting things and not able to respond or, you know, satisfy the family around him. And they begin to wonder about him. And, and the husband takes him to a back alley fixer, right? Exactly. Rust. Rust. It's against the law to, to do that. And this is an illegal bootleg fix. Exactly. I guess I don't remember exactly, but I guess if you had taken them, taken Yang to an ordinary robot hospital, they wouldn't have retired Yang and the family would never have seen him again. Exactly. So he took him to a fixer. And Cleo, Cleo in the museum was sympathetic to that. And she wanted to help him out. So it's Farrell's mission to fix Yang. That's what it's about. So I have to say that I thought, you know, there was a suggestion that Yang was more than just the robot. You know, that always comes up back to the time of Rodman's robots, which was written in a short story that I read in school years ago by some Eastern European writer was actually a play, Rodman's Universal Robots, R-U-R. And there's always a question when you address the subject of whether the robot has become human, whether the robot has developed sensibilities that make him more than a robot. And, and I suspected there were indications of that also in this movie. You agree? Definitely. And he played that role so well. I think he got into acting late. I read it, but I can't remember now. I think he was in some kind of a business thing and eventually sort of fell into acting. He's a Korean actor, you know, and he played this. I mean, it's, as you said, it's not easy to play a role of a robot, you know, especially one that's failing. But he really played it. I mean, the director of this movie really is also part of this because he directs the actors and he did a good job too. You know, I think, what was his name? Do I have that right? Kogodana or something? Yeah, Kogodana. Kogodana, yeah. That's an Asian name. I don't know. It's Japanese. Okay. And it was, you know, it really turned us into an art. Now, as you said, this movie is so smooth and all these profound thoughts or profound symptoms things are in there, you know, about robots. As you said, feeling the robot turned into more than a robot. He developed a little bit of emotions and then the whole family structure and, but they never were able to get him back, I think, right? At the end of the movie, he's still, he's still conked out, right? And it's all flashbacks, right? Yeah, it's all flashbacks and it's all flashbacks to before he conked out. And then after Yang, how are they going to live after Yang because they've fallen into affection with him, you know? He was a member of the family, just like, he was a robot. But, you know, just like animals become part of the family and the robot became part of the family, he wasn't even looked at as a robot anymore. He was looked at as a human, you know? Even though his emotions are not as developed as a human, but yeah, it's just really profound. I liked this movie for all the subtle things and subtle messages, as you mentioned, right? A lot of subtle messages here. Well, the family was really special in a special time and they didn't help us that much in terms of understanding when that time took place or, you know, how it was different from today. But if you have a family and across the street, you have a family with multiple robots, the family structure is different. And at the same time, they're emulating real family. And I guess the young girl, the young girl is... Nika, Nika is her name and Malia Emma, she's Indonesian. Her real, the actress's name is Malia Emma Chan Roy Jaja. Isn't there another daughter too? There was another daughter? The other daughter was not them. It was George's, the neighbor's daughters and the older daughter and then younger daughters, two twins and the older daughter. They're all cyborgs. They're all techno sapiens. Nika, Nika is human, right? Yeah. Nika is human. And that's the problem here, because Nika loves Yang. Nika has grown up with Yang. He's been her, you know, her caretaker. Yeah. And she has a real relationship. And I think that dynamic is something like this. So, Nika is very unhappy that Yang is not functioning. He knows that he's not functioning. She knows he's a robot. She knows that something is wrong. And she puts it on the father, whose name is what? Jake. Jake. That's Colin Farrell. He was really perfect for this part. He's a great actor. And, you know, can you get my Yang fixed? And he cares a lot about Nika. Instead of family dynamic. And that's why he goes to so much trouble, breaks the law, you know, and is willing to pay any amount they want to fix Yang. Even though it's kind of clear that Yang is not really fixable. Nobody can fix Yang. Sadly, because we don't really know that until later in the movie that it's not fixable, you know. So here's Yang, part of the family. And he's a very kind robot. He's caring even. He cares about Nika. There's a thing going on, even though he's a robot. And he's the perfect member of the family. Perfect older brother for Nika. And I think that this is all about trying to retain the family integrity. It's about trying to prevent the deaths, so to speak, of the older brother who Nika cares a lot about. So Jake is willing to go to those extremes and take those risks. And I think one comment I read in one of the reviews is that in this movie, Jake discovers a life that has been passing before him as he reconnects with his wife and daughter. So what's happening? I mean, if you accept that, what's happening is Yang is dying. Yang is not able to be part of their little family. And that Jake is unable to fix that. And in the process, it's pretty subtle, isn't it? That's why it's a good movie. In the process, he rediscovers the family without Yang. Hence the title, After Yang. What happens to these really well-defined characters, these dynamic characters? After Yang and he dies, what do they come to? Where are they going without a robot who played a role? And that's probably the point of it all. And then they show that Yang had two previous owners. And because the lady in the museum, what was her name, Cleo, she was able to take this central computer and break into it to show who was Yang's previous owners. And they show the key points that were picked up. They thought originally it might have been a spy thing, but it was they were picking up key points, emotional points with Yang with the previous owners. And he had this love relationship with this woman. I don't remember if she was actually a technosapien too, right? And they show that, and they show the two previous lives. So I mean, the key thing here is that little girl, Nika, she was devastated by this machine that malfunctioned. So she's getting really closely attached to this technosapien and then he dies. So it would be just like if an actual older brother had died. That's how she dealt with this. Very traumatic for her. You never figure out what the racial thing was. So you have a husband, Jake, who's Howley. Yeah. Now, I think this takes place in arguably, they didn't really save it, in the UK and Britain somewhere. And the wife, who is British and has a British, clearly a British accent, Jody Turner Smith playing here. Yeah, I think she was from Britain, but then as a little girl, they moved to the United States with parents. Well, she's a movie star. But she went to high school and everything. I think college. So she's black. And then the girl, the daughter, the young daughter, Nika is Asian. As you said, she's Thai or whatever it was. Chinese, Indonesian. I have a Chinese. She's a real person. She's a real human being. So she can't be the product of Jake and Kira. She has got to be adopted, maybe. Adopted. Yeah, that's something we're genetically modified. I think in the movie, they said she was adopted and all these children, they're adopting children. So she was definitely adopted. She was an adopted child. But something again about, they said that people couldn't have children or something. Well, that goes to, I think, a central point in the movie. They're trying to create an environment of the future. They can't tell you how things are going to be in the future. And okay, let's take that as nobody seems to have their own natural, nobody seems to have their own natural children anymore for some reason, some environmental reason. And then you have a different kind of family. It's not the same kind of family that you would have today because she's not their natural child. He's adopted. And Yang was, I think, they must have acquired Yang for her. Yes, they did, yeah. To be her tutor, as you said. So here's a family that's not like an ordinary family that has existed for the last 200,000 years in humanity. It's a different kind, different thing. And what you get is this kind of amylozola human experiment. What happens to this unusual family in a world where you can't have your own children in a world where you have to adopt or buy a robot? What happens when one of them dies? And it's traumatic and they really have to work at it and they have to find another family. It's like, you know, if your pet dies, you reorganize your family. It's gone and it's out of your family. So your family morphs into another family, another kind of family. And I think that's what's happening here. But I think what is telling us is that Jake, and for that matter, Jira, really care about having a family. And they are going to work hard at retaining the three-party family, even though the fourth party is gone. And so this is the nature of the family, say, in the 22nd century. Exactly. And how they adapt to the change in circumstances is the human experiment 100 years, 150 years later. You know, the whole Obama thing with the European Caucasian mother and the African father, that's just projected 200 years in the future. And then they adopt a little... I mean, I have cousins who have adopted girls from China. And my former roommate was Korean adopted by an Alabama Christian white family. So I mean, it happens, but this movie shows what's going to happen in the future and how different it is. And we want to talk about what the concept was for Yang. Yang was human-like. Yang had a nicely programmed personality. Exactly. He was well educated. He knew what he had to do to teach Mika. And he was the perfect entry. So you start out with today, where little girls have stuffed animals to the small robots that are being made in Japan and do all kinds of things. And that technology is moving quickly, the chips for it, the dynamics for it. There's a lot of companies, Boston Scientific, are making robots for various purposes, including war. But we are about to see, I think, an explosion of robot technology not only on the assembly line, but at home. And not only to clean the dishes, but to clean the floor. Not only to do labor in the home, but to actually teach our children. It's coming. It's not here yet, but it's coming. And give it another 30, 40, 50, or 100 years. And this will be here. So you get these two dynamics, two vectors. One is you can't have children, families don't grow organically. You have to sort of create artificial families. And the second is that technology of the time coming soon plays a role in filling that gap, that artificial technology. And whether or not the robot loves you, you can love the robot. Like a stuffed animal, but better. Very profound. All these things you're mentioning is just amazing. And to try to wrap our minds around this in our present era, and then what's going to transpire over the next time we reach 100 years. Things will be so different as this technology progresses. I mean, he's just so, you know, he's so real, you know, yang is so real, you know. And, and one of the things they got, they bought an Asian looking robot, technosapien, because of Mika, they wanted her to feel her heritage, you know, that there was some connection with her own heritage. So these are all very important points There's subtle things, there's subtle things that do, if you can extend today's family culture, at least in this country, to what is happening. You know, the diverse, you know, cultural background, the diverse race, the wish to have the adopted robot at least look like the adopted child, so that they would be more comfortable with, you know, all of these, all of these factors, all of these phenomena exist today. It's just that they advanced it by 100 or 150 years. Now, you know, things may even be more advanced in 200 years than this movie projects, you know, because technology is changing so fast in my own life, you know, 70 something years. And, and from where it was in the early late 40s, early 50s to today, it's like phenomenal, you know, I mean, the changes with computers, technology, cell phones, computers, blah, blah, blah. So it's just, it's changing so fast that this may not even be realistic in 120, it may be even more advanced in 100 or 200 years. Well, so let's, let's look at the production values on it. I, I thought it was a very well made movie. Yep. I thought the, the shots of the individuals to sort of to carefully observe their emotional states was good. The acting I mentioned, I thought was very good. I wonder though, I wonder if you had the same, sometimes it moves slowly. And, and of course, what's his name? Cobra Nada was probably wanted to do that. He intended to do that, to let you savor the emotional energy that was going back and forth between them. But you could say that sometimes it moved too slowly. What do you think? If, if the, if a certain scene answers your questions too soon, then what, then it's sort of like, it's not as effective as if, if it gives a little time, you know, we're all human and we need some time to let this all sink in. This, there's some really far-fetched concepts here that we really never really thought about or faced before. So I think this is, this is all planned engineered by him to, to, to keep it slow at certain point. So you look at all the nuances, the machinations of, you know, Colin talking to the museum woman, what was her name? Cleo, you know, back and forth and they're going to put the Yang into a museum, you know, stuff like that. So it's just fascinating, fascinating. There were some interesting quotes about the movie. I don't remember they were on the screen, you know, as quotes or whether they were spoken. But the notion was that you could not understand this family until you understood the demise of one of its members. So that's really interesting. You couldn't, and then to go further, you couldn't understand humanity without understanding what is not human. It's sort of like, you know, it's sort of the mix-minus kind of thing. You take away an essential element in order to understand what's left. And that would, that happened. That meant it was mentioned a couple of times in the movie, one way or another, that you, you needed to appreciate that things were taken away from you before you understood the essence of what was left. I thought there was a lot of thought that went into that. So, George, you know, what did you think in general of this movie? We have reviewed so many movies really over the past couple of years. And this was different, wasn't it? This is a different movie. Definitely different. Science fiction, very thoughtful movie, a careful movie. You knew immediately that they were trying, what's the name, oligonda or whatever, was trying to teach you something about humanity. It's different. There's no violence at all in it. There's only thoughtful people, some of whom are more law-abiding than others. There's members of family trying to play out their family instincts or not. It's a different society. So what did you think of it in terms of comparing it to all the other movies we have seen? It's different. It's not anything like what we've seen before. It's just very different. It's the whole science fiction thing. In the future, the feelings, the emotions between the humanoid and the technosapien, the little girl, and the interaction between her and this yay. This is like nothing we've ever seen before. But as I've said, very, very profound. A lot of different new ways to look at things, new emotions that you feel while you're watching this movie. Just phenomenal. I really like this movie because it's so different. It's hard to rate a movie that's different from all the other movies we've seen. How do you rate it? I just think 10 plus. Not only the acting, but the directing, the scenes, everything. It looked like it was in Japan. The architecture was like a Japanese house. Which I really enjoy. I love the Japanese architecture. That's my favorite architecture along with Frank Lloyd White. I give it a 10 plus, Jay. I leave it a that I go on and on, but it's a 10 plus. It's got all the features that make it a 10 plus, even comparing to all the other ones we've seen. It's really excellent. How do you feel? I love the characters, including Yang. I love them all. Especially the wife. She was just a fantastic guy. I really couldn't take my eyes off the way she was engaging with Frank. She's really elegant. Yeah, elegant. Really a fantastic human being. I guess I would be a little concerned about the speed at which the movie made its way down the path. But if you ask me what I didn't like about the movie, it was nothing I didn't like. If you ask me what the flaws in the movie would be, I can't think of anything. It was poetic. It was a poetic statement. He put us in this other world and then poetically described it. I don't know if I give it a 10 plus, but I give it a 10, George. I'll leave you to be the one with the 10 plus. Yeah, I'll give it the because it just is a motion. In my own life, I'm very familiar with a lot of these things. My cousin adopted the two children from China. My former roommate was this Korean adoptee to a white family in Huntsville, Alabama. There's a lot of things there. My friend, Dianne from Indonesia, Chinese, Indonesia, I was very close with her. She reminds me of this Mika. Mika reminds me of her. There's a lot of things here that are very close to my heart. I'll give it the 10 plus because I feel an emotional tie in this movie other than just an intellectual tie. I'll leave it at that. I'd like to add one other thought here. We really don't know too much about what happened between now the present and that other world that we saw into. Of course, bad things could have happened. The world could have suffered a lot. This movie depicts the surviving culture, the surviving families. You wonder, you don't know how much damage might have taken place. The one thing that struck me, which I would mention here at the end of our discussion, is that these guys were the survivors of whatever happened in the interim. It might have been very unpleasant. My thought was, gee whiz, everything seems so, I don't want to say utopian, but leave it to beaver, kind of a family that works as well as this family did. And I say to myself, are we missing something here? What happened between now and then? Because it's hard to draw, here's the point, it's hard to draw a straight line from our lives here in this country, in this world, from where we are in 2022, with all the Michigás going on everywhere, to where these characters were in the next century. It's hard to draw a straight line. And you can't, you can't, because you know that the way we are now, the direction, including all the issues, including climate change and all that, are leading to a bad place. So what you have to wrap your mind around to appreciate this new world is that it's a surviving world. It's whatever happened to our world with all those negative things happening around us, it somehow survived, and this is the story of the survivors. They may not, you know, they may know more than the people who didn't survive. Remember the movie we saw, I forgot the name of it with that, was it Denzel Washington, you know, after the the nuclear holocaust? What was that? What was the name of that? It was like, remember, what's the book? Yes, that one, there's sort of similarities here because they do allude here that this is the world after there was some kind of a chatechlysmic situation. So maybe, you know, that's, you know, that they, there's still life survives after the catechillicism. And just like the way the book ended, you know, at that castle in San Francisco Bay, you know, that Alcatraz, I think it was, that there's, you know, but do you have to get to that point where we are now, Jay, in America and in the world? It's like, what a mess, you know, we're really in, it's a mess. I mean, Russia, Ukraine, everywhere, you look all the way around the world, even here in Washington, you know, whoever thought January 6th, there would be that kind of thing that went on. So we're in deep trouble. And we don't, you know, nuclear war, I mean, Putin's nuts, you know, we're headed, you know, so I worry about the world in the next two or three years where we're going to be. So, so this might be after, after the chatechlysm. Yeah. Yeah. And this gives me one other thought before we go. And that is the title of the movie is After Yang. Yeah. So we have to be focused on that. And, you know, there's been certain reviews and comments to the effect that, well, he tried hard to make the family survive and come together even in the absence of Yang. But you know, we don't know that for sure. And an equal possibility is that he tried and failed. And the family after Yang is not a good place. We don't know. We left wondering. George, thank you so much. Thank you. George Payson, movie reviewer par excellence. We'll see you next time. You are too. Movie reviewer par excellence. See you in two weeks too. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Mahalo.