It is rare to encounter a female cyborg in Korean cinema, not to mention a female protagonist in a Korean science fiction film. Still an emerging genre in Korea, science fiction has yet to fully come of age, as filmmakers continue to explore ways of connecting this Hollywood-originated form with Korean sensibilities. In this context, Jung_E (2023)—a story centered on a mother-turned-cyborg—marks a bold attempt to craft a distinctively Korean SF narrative. But does the film genuinely contribute to the expansion of the science fiction corpus by probing the intersections of motherhood, femininity, and technological development as it redefines the nature of the human.
To be more precise, Jung_E is an AI-powered humanoid war machine. While the term “cyborg” conventionally denotes a hybrid of machine and organic matter—typically involving the preservation of a human brain—Jung_E is a fully artificial entity. Her operational system is based on a dataset extracted from the brain of Jung-yi, a celebrated soldier who died during a civil war between the Allied Force and the Adrian Republic, a breakaway federation of space colonies established in the aftermath of Earth’s climate catastrophe. As a top combatant for the Allied Force, Jung-yi became the subject of a military experiment led by Kronoid, a defense technology corporation that sought to convert her neurobiological patterns into transferable digital code.
In this sense, Jung_E is both a cybernetic construct and an AI subject: her brain-derived information is digitized, and this digitized intelligence becomes the foundation of her synthetic cognition. At this point, a critical ambiguity emerges: does the data extracted from Jung-yi’s brain constitute a complete replication of her cognitive self—capable of autonomous thought—or is it merely a modular archive of functional segments, reorganizable according to shifting tactical needs? The film leaves this question unresolved. Yet it is clear that elements of Jung-yi’s personal memory, initially purged during the digitization process, begin to reassert themselves in unexpected ways. While Kronoid aims to engineer the ideal combat unit by using Jung-yi’s mind as an algorithmic blueprint for warfare, the reemergence of affective memory destabilizes this project. Fault lines appear in the system, and Jung-yi’s suppressed subjectivity begins to surface within her artificial successor.
Technology Imitates Life
Before becoming an AI robot, Jung-yi was a mother to a young daughter, Seo-hyun, who lay bedridden and required continuous, costly medical treatment. In order to sustain her daughter’s life, Jung-yi became a paid soldier—a mercenary in a war not of her choosing. What distinctly defines Jung-yi’s humanity in the film is her selfless maternal devotion: her willingness to risk her life on the battlefield in order to save her child. Her human subjectivity is thus grounded in motherhood, a condition deeply entangled with the socio-cultural construction of femininity and gender roles.
While the film clearly links Jung-yi’s humanity to her maternal sacrifice, it also leaves her motherhood and femininity open to interpretation by suggesting that she fulfills her maternal duty in a different way. Although Jung-yi is her daughter’s sole caregiver, the form her care takes does not align with conventional depictions of the nurturing, emotionally available mother. Rather than remaining by Seo-hyun’s bedside, Jung-yi chooses to fight—a decision that reconfigures maternal responsibility through a traditionally masculine framework characterized by physical endurance and aggression. In this way, the film presents a rearticulation of motherhood: one that resists sentimental femininity and instead maps maternal care onto the embodied labor of combat.
What Jung-yi actually does on the battlefield is never shown in the film. Her performance as a soldier—enacting maternal responsibility through violence and endurance—is reproduced and reenacted through her mechanical double on a simulated battlefield. It is here that Jung_E, the AI version of Jung-yi, is repeatedly tested for her viability as a perfect combat robot. What the audience sees, then, is not the human Jung-yi in action, but the mechanized Jung_E locked in perpetual combat mode. Only through this the audience can imagine what Jung-yi did for her daughter onthe battlefield.
Jung_E’s body is sleek, metallic, and polished—faster and stronger than a human, and designed for efficiency. In each simulation, she fights with relentless precision and persistence, drawing on data derived from Jung-yi’s cognitive imprint but never entirely replicating it. When she fails—suffering severe damage—her body is discarded and replaced in its entirety. The AI program based on Jung-yi is simply transferred into a new mechanical form, initiating the cycle once again.
In this framework, the alignment of motherhood with a masculine-coded form of labor—physical aggression, strategic calculation, and bodily sacrifice—remains an unfinished process. It is less a fixed identity than a series of iterative attempts, each limited by the short lifespan of the mechanical body. The film thereby stages the expansion of motherhood into a new gendered paradigm as a technological experiment: one that tests not only maternal responsibility but also femininity itself within the parameters of mechanical replication. The cyborg body becomes a site of negotiation where motherhood, femininity, and artificiality are simultaneously constructed, tested, and recalibrated.
The Substance
The artificial body—whether mechanical or biological—can become a contested site for the construction and negotiation of gender. Its artificiality does not necessarily signify a departure from humanity, nor does it inherently subvert normative gender protocols. On the contrary, artificiality can serve to reinforce conventional gender structures, reproducing familiar tropes with heightened intensity. In The Substance (2024), the artificial body sustains and amplifies idealized feminine imagery as it has been shaped by decades of media representation in beauty magazines, television commercials, and the aesthetics of celebrity culture.
The film centers on Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a former aerobics icon and television personality who finds herself replaced because of her age. Elizabeth then turns to a black-market treatment that promises youth through bio-synthetic replication. The treatment splices a younger version of Elizabeth from her own genetic material, creating a fully formed, idealized double. This younger version embodies every detail of the culturally sanctioned female body: tight skin, firm contours, and youthful allure.
Rather than destabilizing gender norms, the artificial body in The Substance functions as an intensified projection of them. The younger Elizabeth becomes the embodiment of prescribed femininity, perfected through science yet rooted in long-standing visual codes. And yet, the film also leaves open the possibility that the meaning of this artificial body is not fixed. It is not simply a reproduction of beauty standards, but a vessel in which the contradictions of gendered embodiment—youth, obsolescence, duplication—begin to emerge and unravel.
The body of Jung_E is mechanical, artificial, and infinitely replaceable, whereas the younger version of Elizabeth in The Substance is likewise artificial but asserts a singular, autonomous identity. In both cases, artificiality becomes the medium through which gender is inscribed, negotiated, and reproduced via science and technology. These representations demonstrate how technological mediation shapes our understanding of gendered embodiment. Yet the contrast between them also suggests that the relationship between technology and gender is not fixed but contingent—shaped by differing social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which these bodies are imagined and produced.