A science fiction version of My Sassy Girl, directed by the original director in Japan. This film is fun, and quite ridiculous, with some major faults in logic (the birthday cake pushing being something that doesn’t quite work out), but it has good visual effects, and the performance of Haruka Ayase while not quite up to Jun Ji-Hyung, is still quite good and enjoyable, and she certainly is damn cute. It does borrow liberally from the Terminator, including the lighting with time travel, and all gets a little too convoluted at the end for it’s own good, but it is a lighthearted Korean love story, so it has to end well somehow. Certainly worth checking out, especially if you are a My Sassy Girl fan, but don’t expect anything deeper, this looks like they really wanted him to make more of the same, and that is what Kwak did here.

Kitamura Jiro is a lonely guy living in Tokyo, without any family left, left to fend for himself on his birthday. At a store he buys himself a present, and while there sees a strange but beautiful girl (Ayase Haruka) stealing clothes, and following him and smiling with him, and finally joining him for a birthday dinner, where she eats like a pig, and then has them run out and get chased by the owner and a cop. Jiro keeps following her, and they end up at his rooftop apartment, and she gets serious, saying that this is where a guy broke up with her, telling her he didn’t even want to see her walk anymore, and she throws a walk through a window. He calms her down, but she takes him to a staircase, before telling him to close his eyes while she leaves, but she stops, and tells him she time travelled from the future, and gets him to open his eyes, before she leaves. A year later Jiro is again alone on his birthday, and buys himself a watch, but the strange girl shows up again, but this time she is a bit different. She goes with him to dinner, and ends up saving him from a madman with a machine gun, and then goes home with him. There her eyes light up, and Jiro is shown a hologram from the future of himself 63 years later. He is crippled, but rich, having won the lottery, and spent years making his dream girl to send back and protect Jiro so he wouldn’t become like him, and that the cyborg can get a soul by living with him.

REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS…

The Region 2 Disc is available at YesAsia though is not cheap!

Jiro is of course in love with her, and her craziness, and even more when she starts using her amazing strength and speed to save people, that Jiro in the future had been saddened by. She saves some kids at soccer camp, a kid from being hit by a truck, stops a hostage taker at a girls school, and she also takes Jiro back in time to see his hometown, which was destroyed in an Earthquake. And he is able to see his dead Grandmother who was actually his mother who died in the quake.

Jiro loves her, and wants to make her love him, though she can never say it. He goes dancing with another girl, but the cyborg just makes him sad, especially when she dances the robot. Then when he is making out with the girl she slaps him, and the cyborg throws her. Jiro freaks out and ends up telling her all the nasty things that the girl originally told him when he met her, and makes her swear to stay away form him. Of couse she still tries to protect him, even bringing him his cat back from the past to live with him.

Then the big Tokyo earthquake happens, and the cyborg shows up to save Jiro again and again, but finally she crushed and must rip herself in half to save him again, and then she is really crushed.

After the quake Jiro digs her out, but she is dead. We then go to 63 years in the future, with Jiro an old man, that has finally managed to rebuild his love, the cyborg, and she has her memory, and he is able to die with her.

We then go further in the future, when a schoolgirl (Ayase Haruka) sees the robot in a museum, and sees it looks just like her, so she buys it for her birthday. The robot is broken, but has all it’s memories, and she implants the vivid memories in herself, falling in love with Jiro in the process. So she travels back in time just to see Jiro, but in actually goes to see him, and this was the first meeting, where she left saddened.

We then see Jiro digging the cyborg out of the rubble, and there is another flash, as the girl comes back to live with Jiro who she loves!

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Silly fun, with some good effects.

As I said the time travel doesn’t always work though. Like the girl sees someone getting their face pushed into a cake on their birthday, and then that is what the cyborg does, but that can only be because Jiro programmed her, because she was not the original girl, but he doesn’t like it so… And of course we have alternate timelines being created by each event, but this is a romantic comedy after all.

Cute.