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\u201cEven better if you see it as a family,\u201d exclaimed the ads for a movie that opened a couple weeks ago here in Seoul and has now made it to Los Angeles. The posters showed a middle-aged man hanging out with a diminutive, somewhat R2-D2-like robot and the title Robot, Seori <\/em>(\ub85c\ubd07, \uc18c\ub9ac). The film bears the official English title of SORI: Voice from the Heart<\/em>, but I prefer the simpler, more literal translation I\u2019ve seen used here and there: Robot Sound<\/em>. In some respect it reflects the content more clearly, given that the story concerns a robot fallen to Earth, and specifically to the South Korean coastline, originally designed by the U.S. National Security Agency as a component of a satellite that records the sound content of and, using its formidable artificial intelligence, recognizes the voices in all phone calls made across the globe.<\/p>\n
The robot lands at the feet of Hae-kwan, the fellow on the poster, a disheveled late-fortysomething nearly a decade into an increasingly hopeless search for his missing daughter Yoo-joo. \u201cThis is crazy talk,\u201d he says in the words that also constitute the picture\u2019s tagline, \u201cbut I think this guy knows how to find my daughter.\u201d But the robot turns out not to be a guy, or at least Hae-kwan decides it mustn\u2019t be one after rolling it into a clothes store (having borrowed his wheelchair-bound techie friend\u2019s spare conveyance to cart his discovery around) in order to buy it some kind of disguise. He suggests a black hooded sweatshirt, but Sori (for the robot has by now taken as a name the Korean word for sound) wheels over to a pink one instead, which sets up, for me, the biggest laugh line of the movie: \u201cYou\u2019re a woman?\u201d shouts the flabbergasted Hae-kwan. \u201cYes?\u201d responds the suddenly nervous girl minding the shop.<\/p>\n
SORI<\/em> has its moments of comedy, at other times plays like a geopolitical techno-thriller, and at other times still goes, as so many Korean movies do, for the melodrama. The tone, as well as the human-robot buddy pairing, remind me of Short Circuit<\/em>, that tale of a gentle animal-handler and an experimental treaded military drone brought to wisecracking life by the strike of a lightning bolt. John Badham, the director of that film as well as others like Blue Thunder<\/em>,War Games<\/em>, Stakeout<\/em>, and Bird on a Wire<\/em>, lays fair claim to the title of one of the masters of 1980s Hollywood, whose sensibility mainstream Korean entertainment has recently rediscovered and begun reinterpreting. A broad but energetic buddy-cop picture called Veteran<\/em> (\ubca0\ud14c\ub791) last year became the third highest-grosser in Korean cinema history, and at a Q&A after a screening I asked its director Ryoo Seung-wan what other police movies he likes; he citedBeverly Hills Cop <\/em>and 48 HRS. <\/em>as his direct inspirations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n