'After Yang' takes a more sensitive and humane approach to artificial intelligence.
We’re light-years from film’s early depictions of artificial intelligence: HAL 9000, the monotone and murderous computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, seems futile; C-3PO, the clunky but clutch sidekick in the Star Wars franchise, seems comically rudimentary. Filmmakers have treated the division between human and artificial intelligence as absolute. In Steven Spielberg’s A.I.
Science fiction films have lingered in this uncanny valley, where it's difficult to distinguish between human and machine and the existential anxiety is palpable. But Kogonada's sophomore film After Yang makes bold new strides, suggesting not only that the border between human and nonhuman is permeable, but that the cross-pollination between man and machine can be generative.
Russ and Cleo represent two sides of the same coin: on one hand, the fear of something we don’t understand, the side that the genre has examined in-depth; on the other hand, the joy of connection. This side is Kogonada's revelation. Yang’s original purpose was to connect Jake and Lyra’s adopted daughter Mika to her Chinese heritage, but there’s more to him than anyone knew. Cleo, for one, sees this as exciting, not threatening. Perhaps life in this hybrid future is not a zero-sum game.
After Yang is focused on asking these questions, not answering them, but it suggests Yang is human in the ways that matter. Through his memories, we know he is Ada's friend and Mika’s brother. Ada is a clone and Yang is a techno, but those distinctions don't mean anything in practice. Though Mika is definitively human and Yang is not quite, both have been adopted by Jake and Kyra, integrated into one family.
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