The Rare Korean SF

Several months ago I read that Korean filmmakers were under pressure - from the government, I think - to start making science fiction movies. The Competition (Hollywood and Japan) had sci-fi movies, so Korean Pride demanded a domestic substitute.
So when Natural City became the first Korean SF movie I noticed in the video store, I was curious.
Verdict: If you were going to watch sci-fi anyway this is probably better than whatever you had in mind.
Why? Because it's centered around a convincing love story, which SF (aimed as it normally is at young boys who don't date) almost never offers.
Natural City draws heavily and openly from other SF films. The most obvious is Blade Runner, from which even the sets appear to have been re-used. But I won't fault the director for that. Korean SF films are still in their infancy, and everyone knows that the best method for becoming good at something is to begin by imitating people who are already successful, and then go on to develop your own style. Plus, Natural City isn't just in imitation. It definitely improves on its predecessors.
Harrison Ford's character in Blade Runner is a police detective in pursuit of a dangerous artifical man, while falling in love with an artificial woman. Being factory-made, both the villain and the love interest have very limited lifespans. This makes for a bittersweet ending: the villain reaches the end of his shelf life and spontaneously expires, but Harrison knows that his girlfriend is doomed as well.
Natural City is based around some cruel modifications to Blade Runner. The screenwriters must have asked: what if BR began with the girlfriend already nearing end-of-warranty, and the villian not looking to die anytime soon? The love story is between the police officer protagonist (named R) and the female android (named Ria), but one suspends disbelief enough to accept that she's an artificially created human, it's done quite convincingly. It helps that the process of their meeting and falling in love is part of the backstory - that's always the hardest part of a romantic story to pull off.
Not only is Ria breaking down, but she gets moody and depressed like a real person. As R turns to increasingly desperate measures to keep his girl alive and happy, the relationship them resembles more and more that between a crack addict and the drug. He's on a police SWAT team that eliminates renegade androids, but R himself tries to keep the team's targets as undamaged as possible so he can salvage their parts for Ria. This has serious consequences, as R's delicacy toward the enemy gets a number of other police officers messily killed. He goes even so far as to kidnap a real girl in the hope of implanting Ria's mind into her.
R is another of those morally ambiguous characters who confuse and frustrate American reviewers of Korean films. He never relents, but starts taking his job seriously only on realizing there's really no hope of saving Ria. In the Hollywood formula, a character might make sacrifices for a loved one, but things inevitably turns out for the best. Not in Natural City. The reward is an action-movie wrap-up that still reflects fate's moral neutrality. That, and in the end we finally learn what Ria's been thinking the whole time.