Director/Screenplay/Photography – Byung Chun-min, Producer – Lee Dong-jun, Music – Jae-jin Lee. Production Company – Tube Entertainment.
Yoo Ji-tae (R), Lee Jae-eun (Cyon), Seo Lin (Ria), Yoon Chan (Noma), Jung Eun-pyo (Dr Goi), Jung Doo-hong (Cyper), Ju-hye Ko (Ami)
Sometime in the 2070s. The use of cyborgs has become widespread, but these are created with built-in lifespans that terminate after a set date. R is a member of the MPs, a heavily armed police force that hunts rogue cyborgs, although he has been placed on suspension. He loves the cyborg Ria but her termination date is nearing. R seeks to have Ria’s mind transplanted into another body and believes that Cyon, an urchin living in the shantytown outside the city, might be the right body to house her. At the same time, R and fellow officer Noma are drawn into a scheme by the rogue cyborg Cyper to bring down the Neucom corporation.
The IMDB makes the claim that Natural City is an adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1969) by Philip K. Dick, the book that became the basis of Blade Runner (1982). This is not true. It is however a homage to many aspects of Blade Runner but is not a remake of that film and certainly not an adaptation of Dick’s book, which differs significantly from Blade Runner the film. (What people don’t seem aware is that the IMDB is not an authoritative data source but a user-submitted wiki and often its information is left uncorrected – in reality, its accuracy should be placed on the same standing as Wikipedia articles).
Certainly, there are plot elements in Natural City that are familiar to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner – like the hero who hunts the androids (although here he belongs to a highly miltarised police force as opposed to being a lone bounty hunter). Notedly, most of these are elements that have been taken from the Blade Runner film rather than the Dick book – the androids with built-in lifespans, the hero and his android love (where the film at least offers a better attempt to resolve her terminal lifespan than Blade Runner did – here the hero tries to place her chip into a human body).
Natural City also uses a good deal of Cyberpunk atmosphere as per Blade Runner. There is the dense cityscape covered in ever-present rain; the building-sized advertising displays and holograms; the invocations to go offworld – here you can even access Virtual Reality experiences of doing so; large ships of some type passing overhead and so on. The hero even stops to dine at a street-level Chinese restaurant. The film also seems to borrow the odd move from a contemporary like The Matrix (1999), albeit on a low-budget, and perhaps even more so the action stylistics of John Woo, who had developed a moderate Western cult in the late 1990s.
Natural City has frustrations in the scripting department. The plotting is moribund. There is a set-up but then nothing much happens that carries the plot forward. Things do happen but it is not always clear why – at one point, hero Yoo Ji-tae rides his motorcycle through Lee Jae-eun’s house and into the water. Why? Not the slightest idea except perhaps in the previous scene the club owner refuses to let his android girlfriend get up and dance. Things do come together somewhat at the end but it is not the most coherent of explanations.
One of these frustrations Natural City – at least in the subtitled version I viewed – is the common confusion between Androids and Cyborgs. Androids are robots built with human likeness, sometimes to the point of being almost completely indistinguishable. By contrast, cyborgs are regular humans with enhancement by machine parts a la The Six Million Dollar Man (1973-8). What we have in the film keeps being referred to as cyborgs, although in practice is far more androids. You cannot help but think it would be inhumanely cruel to create cyborgs, which would be simply humans with modified parts, but then simply give them built-in lifespans and treat them as a disposable underclass as we see occurring throughout the film.
Trailer here