That was kind of like finding a string quartet in the middle of a Metallica album. (Yes, I know.) After two days of gleeful carnage, sudden action, and low humor, Robot Stories came along and provided two hours of gently humanistic science fiction.
There’s science fiction as the literature of ideas, in which the driving force is the concept; then there’s science fiction that uses the tropes of science fiction to tell stories that couldn’t exist in the world in which we live. Greg Pak’s movie is the latter. The best of the four independent segments is the last, “Clay,” which tells the story of a dying sculptor grappling with the possibility of uploading himself and finding immortality. It’s a common enough science fictional concept, but the segment is not about the implications of uploading — although Pak clearly understands them — it’s about the implications of the human decision to upload or not upload.
It warms my heart to see quote unquote art films walking this territory. This made a really nice change of pace from the rest of FantAsia, and now it’s off to see a Korean horror movie.