MAY OUR LORD MANXIN BE WITH YOU?
What if there is a fortune-telling application that can predict 96.3% accurately? The episode starts with A company called Pricon a fortune-telling program, The name of the fortune-telling program is Manxin. Almost everyone in South Korea is dependant on this app. No daily lives can go without people finding out how their day is going to be like. I love the opening song. It's a song by I MONSTER titled Daydream In Blue. It fits so well with the scene.
To Sun Wo (Lee Yeon Hee) lost her sister because of an accident and later finds out Manxin has something do with it. She starts looking for the creator of Manxin and finds out shocking things. Along with her Jung Da Ram (Lee Dong Hwi), A Manxin believer follows, He wants to find out who is the man behind Manxin. To Sun Wo doesn't believe in Manxin's predictions but Jung Da Ram is a hardcore believer. Together they go through a lot of shocking stuff to find out who Manxin is.
The acting was amazing. I love how raw Lee Yeon Hee's acting is. I really want her north star jacket. She looks damn good. Lee Dong Hwi's acting is a killer, his acting is flawless as usual. I loved his hairstyle, I need to get one like that. The story is complicated but it was directed very simple. I wanted more but there is not much room in the episode.
Manxin's ending was beautifully cremated. It doesn't end like how "The Prayer" ended. I couldn't predict the ending at all. I loved how smooth and simple it ended for a complicated story.
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Manxin had interesting cinematography, and refreshing camerawork and quirky editing. However, the story was not enough to fill up the length of the episode. It was also not well explained and sometimes it got confusing to follow.
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In the near future, a fortune-telling AI called Manxin has been developed that mines big data and uses an algorithm to predict the future. The AI has an accuracy rate of over 96% and its associated app is free. As such, its use has grown until it underpins the majority of actions and interactions in Korea. The impact of the app is not beneficial, however, nor even benign. The economy has slumped, unemployment is high and homelessness is on the rise.
A young woman To Sun-ho (an almost-unrecognisable Lee Yun-hee) is on the search for answers about Manxin after her sister - a Manxin addict - died in a freak accident involve a sinkhole. How could this be possible? Didn't Manxin warn her? Did it send her to her death? Why would it do that? Essentially, Sun-ho is driven by the question that disaffected believers have been asking for eternity: why did God allow this to happen?
To Sun-ho is soon joined on her journey by Manxin cultist Jung Ga-ram (Lee Dong-hwi), who despite his worship of the AI is not a blind ideologue. The two begin their search for the AI, her to question it, him to be in its presence.
On the surface, this episode of SF8 is a simple discussion of free will in an ordered universe. It is a truism that if we knew the position of every molecule in the Universe we could accurately predict the future. An ordered and mechanistic Universe negates the existence of free will. Whether that Universal order comes from a consciousness or not isn't important in this context. Whether it's physics or God we ultimately have no control over the world and we will therefore cling to the idea that we can find a clue to the future. Basically, it's humans who want Gods. That's why we create them.
Whether Manxin has another level to it is up to debate. It's short - a mere 50 minutes - and so maybe it didn't have time to tease out some of its themes. Or maybe that really is all there is to it.
Unlike The Prayer, which was basically perfect, Manxin suffers from a number of flaws. The main one is the vague and almost trite "fortunes" that the AI delivers to people daily. They're designed to be familiar to people in a shamanistic culture but are open to interpretation in ways that undermine the "96.3% accuracy" of the show's premise. Which of course is one of the criticisms of shamanism from those outside the culture (of which I am admittedly one).
The ending opens up a lot of questions, which ultimately is what good scifi is supposed to do. If everything in the Universe is destined, then can we exert free will by our choice not to be informed of that destiny? Can we choose whether we want the illusion of free will? And if so, is that free will?
Overall, Manxin is an enjoyable watch but it left me wanting more.
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