A New Sci-Fi Film From the Director of Train to Busan Is Doing Gangbusters on Netflix

According to Netflix’s Weekly Top 10, Yeon Sang-ho, Train to Busan’s director, sees his most recent creation hitting number one in the Top 10 non-English movies category in its debut week.

While Jung_E premiered on Jan. 20, 2023, according to Netflix’s official site, it already recorded a total of 19.3 million hours viewed in just three days, entering the Top 10 list of 80 countries.

The South Korean sci-fi movie presents an alternative version of Earth, in a post-apocalyptic scenario set in the 22nd century, where humans live in a civil war in space as their home planet is uninhabitable. Kang Soo-yeon is Yun Seo-hyun, the team leader of the Jung_E project at the Kronoid Laboratory where they’re trying to develop brain cloning.

As her mother Captain Yun Jung-yi (Kim Hyun-joo) died during the civil war when she was a child, they’re trying to clone her brain to create a robot mercenary capable of putting an end to the civil war. The movie features the final appearance of Kang Soo-yeon who passed away due to cardiac arrest in May 2022, ahead of the film’s release.

Although its popularity on the streaming platform is undeniable, Jung_E is not impressing some of the viewers as it currently holds a middling 5.4 out of 10 on IMDb and a lacklustre 47 percent approval on Rotten Tomatoes. While the plot is deemed unoriginal, the emotional mother-daughter relationship seems to be what keeps people watching, as well as the action-fighting scenes. In short, it appears, Yeon Sang-ho is yet to top Train to Busan. However, for fans of robots and AI, this might be an entertaining way to pass the time.