No, After Yang is not about the state of New York City after the failed mayoral campaign of 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and entrepreneur Andrew Yang — though, like the forward-thinking math rhapsodist politician, After Yang does have some thought-provoking technology-driven ideas about the future and is built on an Asian American character. After Yang is a Showtime film, also available in select theaters and on Amazon Prime through its Showtime add-on, about a not particularly tight-knit family and the very human-looking robot that was one of the few things holding it together and their somber search for a way to revive the robot, as well as the husband, wife, and daughter’s relationships with one another, when the robot suddenly stops functioning.
The husband, wife, and daughter are Jake (Colin Farrell), Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith), and Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). Mika is an adopted child as well as an only child. To assuage their daughter’s loneliness and sense of isolation from those around her, they’ve given her a robot sibling named Yang, hoping that he can be a handy older brother to her as well as a family member who can help her connect with her Chinese roots. Yang seems to have been effective in both of these roles. And, as we learn, he also turned into an empathetic companion and confidant of Jack’s. As human-looking as he is, though, Yang is still a piece of technological equipment, and like even the best man-made machines, he is subject to periodic crashes and inconvenient malfunctions.
Unfortunately for Mika and her parents, one day Yang simply ceases to work. Like a bricked computer, he will not restart. We’ve all been there before. Jack and Kyra debate whether to try to get him fixed — after all, he does still have three years left on his warranty — or whether simply to buy a new one. “We’ve been overly reliant on him,” says Kyra. “We’ve spent a lot of money on him,” says Jake. But the dilemma is more acute for Mika, the adopted little girl. Because Yang is also not merely a machine. It is much harder to say “just get a new one” when the machine in question is your brother.
Recognizing how attached Mika had become to him, Jack and Kyra reach a compromise: They will try to get Yang fixed. But if they do not succeed, they will not buy another sibling for her. Instead, they will make a genuine effort to be more involved in raising her and in connecting her to her culture and heritage.
They take him from mechanic to mechanic, including a Genius Bar-type of technological support store for robots, but the hardware problems with Yang are too difficult for any of them to solve. As a last resort, Jack takes Yang to Cleo (Sarita Choudhury), a woman who has dedicated her life to trying to understand these “technosapiens,” as these humanoid robots are called in the near-future world of this film. If Yang cannot be salvaged, she at least would like Jack to donate Yang’s memories, which can be salvaged, to her collection to aid in humanity’s understanding of this new species of techno-humans. It is here when this slow-starting movie really begins to take off, not that it begins to proceed at a more frantic clip — its action is restrained and its pacing unhurried, making it feel longer than its run time of 1 hour and 36 minutes. As we watch Jack look into Yang’s memories, attempting to learn more about his technosapien son, he discovers what the world looked like through Yang’s eyes, and in the process, he begins to discover how much Yang meant not only to his daughter but to him as well.
After Yang plays with some big ideas about the possible future integration of humans and technology and the coming synergy (or “singularity”) between organic and nonorganic life — the kind of ideas explored by futurists such as Ray Kurzweil and thinkers such as Yuval Noah Harari in his 2015 book Homo Deus. This is territory that has been extensively explored by its cinematic predecessors as well. From Blade Runner (1982) to A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and from The Terminator (1984) to Ex Machina (2014), filmmakers have been fascinated by the possibility of us human beings living alongside humanlike robots and have been keen on portraying the consequences of this long-envisioned technological quantum leap.
But where The Terminator and Ex Machina put these utopian visions to the service of dystopian terror, and where Blade Runner pondered these possibilities within the context of an action film (if a particularly thoughtful one), After Yang is most in league with A.I., the film begun by Stanley Kubrick and completed by Steven Spielberg in 2001. Both films are based on a science fiction short story: “Saying Goodbye to Yang” by film co-writer Alexander Weinstein and “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” by Brian Aldiss. Like A.I., After Yang is also about a family that acquires a humanoid robot (Haley Joel Osment, at the height of his post-Sixth Sense fame) as a son. And like A.I., After Yang is a meditation on what life might be like for these technosapiens — not about our fears of them but about what their fears, frustrations, dreams, and desires might be about their existences with us. Key moments in both films occur in forests, bucking the science fiction convention of action occurring primarily in highly developed cities, and even the doll-like makeup and mannequinlike expressions that Justin H. Min wears as the titular robot character in After Yang are reminiscent of the similar mannequinlike appearance of the jocund robot Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) in A.I.
Unlike A.I., however, in After Yang there are no elaborate climactic set pieces and no major dramatic reveals. The closest we get to one is a discovery that is more evocative of a critical photographic reveal in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) than anything in mainstream Hollywood science fiction. And while one of A.I.’s major themes is the Pinocchio-like attempt of David (Haley Joel Osment) to become human, After Yang subverts this theme almost entirely, seeking to understand robots on their own terms rather than believe that they must inevitably desire to conform themselves to ours. “Did he ever want to be human?” Jack asks Cleo. “That’s such a human thing to ask,” she replies. “We always assume other beings would want to be human. What’s so great about being human?” (That sound we hear is Carlo Collodi, author of the original Pinocchio, rolling over on his lounging cloud in literary heaven.)
While After Yang lacks the dramatic heft of A.I., it does have the careful, contemplative quality of art films. What most other science fiction films do with big dramatic gestures, After Yang does in a still small voice. Not everyone will be able to hear it, but everyone, and especially anyone who has had an overly reliant attachment to their computer or smartphone, should try to see it.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
