It’s a rare thing to find media that swims in the murky, mutagen-polluted waters of cyberpunk that doesn’t tackle world-ending stakes—a massive conspiracy covering up the true nature of reality or two here, a megacorporation’s attempt to control a force of nature gone wrong there. Even rarer is it to find a cyberpunk tale that takes more than 20 minutes to experience that doesn’t resort to a bit of the old ultraviolence before the end. It’s common practice in the world of writing to ramp the stakes of the protagonist’s conflict to the logical extreme; otherwise, it becomes boring. But in the realm of science fiction, unfortunately, the stakes are rarely ever personal. After all, the tech involved is too fantastic to exist in reality at the time of writing, so why not go big with it?

Hence why watching Advantageous feels like such a welcome change. Director Jennifer Phang (who co-wrote the script with lead actor Jacqueline Kim) provides us with a dystopian future that explores the mundane struggles of everyday life. By scaling the conflict down from an adrenaline-fueled thriller to a heartfelt drama, we as an audience can allow our hearts to bleed or break for the lives we watch play out onscreen, allowing us to set aside our Penfield mood organs and bottles of mandatory happy pills and feel like goddamn human beings again.

Synopsis

Advantageous begins with spokeswoman Gwen Koh and her daughter Jules singing “Il est Né”, a French Christmas carol, together. Gwen works for the Center for Advanced Health and Living, a biotech corporation in a metropolis plagued by rising global temperatures, ubiquitous surveillance, and terrorism, while Jules studies more complex subjects in middle school than I’d even hoped to comprehend by my college years. Gwen’s attempts to secure her daughter’s future become jeopardized by rejected applications into prestigious schools and her contract with the Center as its face expires with no hope for renewal due to her age. Upon receiving the news about her sudden employment scarcity from her boss/former lover Dave Fisher, Gwen searches for options with an agent from an outplacement service but doesn’t manage to find anything that will sustain her lifestyle. After a conversation with Center for Advanced Health and Living exec Isa Cryer about the oncoming singularity, Gwen realizes that her agent is an artificial intelligence (and a fairly passive-aggressive one at that). She begins to feel the noose tighten as she turns to family and friends she has long since cut ties with to no avail—a pronounced example being Gwen’s cousin, Lily, who she was once close with. All the while, Gwen keeps her desperate situation with Jules a secret, until the Center offers to renew Gwen’s contract under one condition: she must undergo a new procedure pioneered by the Center that will place her consciousness into a new body.

Fisher, apprehensive about Gwen’s new agreement with the biotech firm, meets with her on a boardwalk where they won’t be overheard by the city’s CCTV system in order to reveal to her vital information about the procedure. Due to clever editing, this information is initially left out, though Fisher does make mention that it’s not like dumping Gwen’s consciousness from one jar to another, due to the limitations of modern technology (which, if you’re familiar with philosophy commonly adopted by cyberpunk, you know where this is headed). Gwen, however, understands that this is her only option to secure a future for Jules, asking for Christmas with her daughter before the procedure. She takes time to set her affairs in order and reconnect with her cousin’s family. In the film’s most emotionally charged scene, she reveals that she had an affair with Lily’s husband, Han, with whom she conceived Jules, in an attempt to atone for her actions and beg for financial assistance.

After choosing her new body’s appearance with Jules, Gwen undergoes the procedure. Gwen 2.0’s experiences are initially confusing and overstimulating, requiring her to take drugs for the first year to adjust. Gwen’s relationships with her Lily and Han are soon on the mend, and she is able to place Jules in the academy of her choosing by forging relationships with debutantes that are part of a self-labeled elite society. However, it soon becomes clear that Gwen’s connection with Jules, which until this point has been shown to be tender and affectionate, has somehow been damaged. At first, Jules questions the validity of the procedure, and Gwen becomes more and more irritated with her for seemingly no reason. Out of frustration with Gwen 2.0’s newfound alienation from Jules, Fisher reveals that Gwen 2.0 is not actually Gwen at all—Gwen’s memories and personality were simply copy/pasted to Gwen 2.0’s mind, dying in the process. Fisher simply omitted the memory of the previously mentioned conversation on the boardwalk in an attempt to make sure Gwen 2.0 was as true to the original as possible. Naturally, the Center of Advanced Health and Living makes serious bank off this existentially horrifying procedure.

Jules comes to the conclusion that Gwen 2.0 is not her mother, seemingly considering to deprive her of the medicine she needs to survive before Gwen tells her that her purpose is to take care of Jules, which begins to forge a bond between them. Gwen 2.0 later tells Lily and Han of Gwen’s fate. In the film’s final scene, Gwen and Jules meet with Lily and Han’s family in a park for a picnic, an air of melancholic joy hanging over them as they take the long, slow road to recovery.

Analysis

Advantageous is an intelligent, intuitive projection of the future and possibly one of the most realistic I’ve ever seen portrayed in a movie while still compelling me to learn more about it. Technically speaking, for a low-budget film, it rarely leans on cheap gimmicks to lure the audience in—on two occasions that I noticed, there is some panning over a somewhat crudely-rendered cityscape, and aside from those and a few police surveillance drones floating around the city throughout the film, the film’s effects are largely seamless. Otherwise, Advantageous paints a convincing picture of a well-kept city that has grown past capacity. The film’s use of on-location sets is superb—each street, building, and interior delivers the sleek, hard edges of the dystopian tomorrow we know without going overboard. It’s clear that Jennifer Phang draws some inspiration for visuals (and themes) from 1995’s Ghost in the Shell (a Neon Dystopia favorite).

On the other side of the coin, Gwen and Jules’ apartment portrays a domestic and charming environment that somehow doesn’t derail the film’s tone in the slightest, which is quite the change from the typical (post-)cyberpunk protagonist’s living space—most often either a dingy, messy den or a slick, über-modern condo that lacks any human warmth. The costume design also conveys a sensibility—most costumes are ageless, simple getups that could be worn in any era (though at one point Gwen wears a frilled blouse that evokes a sense of the neo-renaissance, which is also reflected by the film’s use of damask patterning). Perhaps the weakest part of the overall design is the soundtrack, which, to me, felt largely unremarkable.

The film’s casting felt like the best possible choice to me. Standout performances are provided by James Urbaniak (Fisher) and Ken Jeong (Han), who are better known for playing comedic roles (perhaps best known as the voice of Doctor Venture in The Venture Bros. and Ben Chang in Community, respectively). Once or twice they stumble, but on the whole both make impressive breaks from their supposed molds (as opposed to some actors who have tried to do the same thing). However, the show is stolen by Jacqueline Kim in her role as Gwen, supported by co-stars Samantha Kim (unrelated to the former, though you wouldn’t know it by how their onscreen relationship plays out) as Jules, and Freya Adams as Gwen 2.0 in the film’s final act. Jacqueline Kim’s performance as an independent and self-sacrificing mother in a shrinking world is complex, moving, and precise.

This article was made possible by R. Nicholas Starr, founder of Kunstwerk Multimedia. Musician, award-winning artist, and journalist, Starr explores an immersive science fiction world primarily through music. Releasing under the names of Esgal, Tobias Keller, Borgasm, and soon ArTek, each project becoming it’s own character in Starr’s Protean world.

Starr is also a biohacker, researcher, and active in the US Transhumanist Party, publishing several non-fiction works related to transhumanist topics. For more information, visit https://www.kunstwerkmultimedia.com

The film’s structure and dialogue are high-quality for a low-budget science fiction film, driving the tension appropriately until the end of the second act, which, against convention, is when the climax occurs; the final act with Gwen 2.0 is all falling action, as Gwen’s greatest conflict—sacrificing her life so her daughter can have one of her own—is resolved upon the commencement of her procedure. However, the strongest part of the film’s writing (as it usually is with dystopian science fiction) is the world-building. Gwen and Jules live in a society that, as resources and economic stability become scarce, is becoming more and more unforgiving to women. Advantageous’ dystopian environment seems to center around the popularization of AI in the workforce, which has displaced millions of people from their occupations. Fisher makes mention at one point that job recruiters feel it is safer to leave women unemployed to return to conservative gender roles, as opposed to putting men out onto the streets. Despite the anti-feminist undertones of this sentiment, it might sound good on paper, but in reality the situation is desperate. Gwen discovers a homeless girl living under some brush in a garden outside her apartment building at one point, who appears to be despondent due to her situation. Terrorism is common, and many buildings are shown being bombed throughout the film with no characters so much as batting an eyelash. Audio clippings of news programs spin yarns of child prostitution on the rise, and despite taking place in the winter in a city that appears to be New York, the weather is downright summery throughout. Early on in the film, Jules mentions that the stress of hyper-productivity put on women causes many to overproduce ova, which causes many to become barren by the age of twenty. At one point, Jules and Gwen hear women in the apartments both below and above theirs crying (presumably due to distressing circumstances), which is neatly mirrored later when Gwen cries in her own room in response to her fate after signing her life away.

After all, Gwen is a sophisticated, capable woman—she is the head of a biotech firm, can speak fluent French and play the piano, as well as holds a number of other talents, and all of these advantages are not enough to save her. She lives in a crumbling world that, as Isa Cryer states, is leaving humanity behind, and she is fighting not to become a casualty of that. Her struggle reflects the struggle each of us has likely felt at one time or another—sacrificing the things we want, our hopes and dreams, in order to keep up with this incomprehensibly changing world. No one “forces” us to take jobs under the banners of unsympathetic and unethical corporations, but most of us have no options otherwise. So, upon renewing a contract with a company that literally kills her, Gwen breaks the bond she has with her daughter in order to save her future—a complication that I can only figuratively relate to, having been both on the dealing and receiving end of relationships damaged by the stressors of modern life. In the end, though, all we as humans can really do is accept the pain we’re given and attempt to move forward.

Ultimately, Advantageous doesn’t strictly fall within the category of pure cyberpunk, though the world it inhabits is filled with its own dangers and despair. It has the unique quality of toeing the line between cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk, but due to Gwen’s status as a successful businesswoman (thusly negating the “punk” elements), and the heavy sociological factors that seem to largely override the high-tech focus of most cyberpunk, it more solidly falls into the post-cyberpunk subgenre. (And as a pithy side note, I feel like we’ve really gotta change the name of post-cyberpunk to something else.) But if you like Ghost in the Shell for the philosophical bits, Advantageous might give you some more food for thought along those same lines—and is a worthier spiritual successor than its most recent adaptation, too.

Advantageous – 9/10

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