Cyborg Girl - Boku no kanojo wa saibôgu (2008)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0929860/



For a decent synopsis, I recommend the one found in the comment section of the
IMDB entry. Time-travel plays a crucial role in the story plot though it remains in the background and is never expanded on. If you want to make the time-line fit with causality you're bound to run into confusing contradictions, so a bit of caution is in place. However, in case you do want to understand the time-line but get frustrated in trying to do so then head on over to the appendix, where I try to explain one and other and indicate where the 'shoe don't fit'.

In order to zoom in on the predictive programming elements we must first address the properties of the thematic centerpiece of the movie, the cyborg companion.



The main character of the movie, Jiro, is a young Japanese guy living a boring and lonely life, having no female companion. All of a sudden however, a cyborg with female physical features enters his life completely unannounced. As the story unfolds it gets clear that not only does the 'cyborg girl' possess extraordinarily effective defensive and protective powers, 'she' also happens to be stunningly beautiful.

The cyborg not only prevents Jiro from coming to harm on various occasions but she also manages to avert lethal danger for quite a number of other people.



The cyborg girl saves Jiro's life from a psycho gunman annex impromptu amateur flame thrower in the restaurant where Jiro is celebrating his lonely birthday.



With superhuman speed and prowess, on another occasion she proceeds to neutralize some random hostage-taker from hurting a good number of people in some random building.



At another place, again with a superhuman effort, she manages to snatch and rescue a kid who carelessly wandered onto the streets and who would otherwise be instantly crushed to death by an approaching truck.




Later she rescues an entire soccer-team from acute death by fire and as a Pièce de résistance she rescues Jiro's life, several times no less. Unfortunately though during the earthquake of Tokyo while saving Jiro once again her lifetime too 'expires'.



Lest I forget, in addition to her astonishing protective and life saving capabilities she is also quite an accomplished electric boogie dancer...



...and her eyes are equipped with an impressive hologram projector and she proves to be a resourceful and versatile cook...



...and did I say already that she possesses an incredible physical strength, easily kicking the butts of street thugs without so much as a breath; also she has no trouble in lifting up obstructive buses as if they were mere toys.



At the end of the movie, long after Jiro has died and the lifetime of the cyborg companion too has expired, a young Japanese woman, who turns out to be the spitting image of the cyborg girl, buys the memory chip that once belonged to the cyborg girl. As such, she retrieves all the memories of the cyborg, especially the ones in relation to Jiro of course. She thus becomes so intrigued with the electronically induced memories and accompanying feelings that she decides to pay Jiro a visit, by going back into the past using a presumed time-machine, one year in advance of Jiro's first meeting with the cyborg girl he grew to love so much.



The real life girl, though provided with brain-chip implant, quickly falls hopelessly in love with Jiro and decides to go back in time to the time just after the Tokyo earthquake to take over the role as Jiro's female companion from the cyborg who gave her life (if you can call it that) to Jiro just previously.

As with all movies, predictive programming elements and themes can be detected by understanding the effect the movie has on the viewer, in particular by imagining the effects on the unsuspecting and gullible viewer. In case of this movie, the viewer is likely to be mesmerized by the romantic side to the story, which admittedly was very strongly present indeed.

Unfortunately, a sobering analysis a la predictive programming leaves less room for a romantic interpretation.

Here we have a cyborg female robot that is physically extremely attractive, she is nifty and harnesses plenty of useful and convenient skills, making her outstandingly capable of tremendously beneficial and life-saving feats. So apart from lacking feelings and libido (?), she proves to be the ideal partner for any lonely male. In other words, the movie leaves the viewer with quite a favorable impression of the cyborg and, to some extent, may even identify with it.

At the end of the movie, a real life female gets to be implanted with the memory chip of the then expired cyborg. During her visit to Jiro, this genuine human falls in love with him, because she can "feel his heart". This means that the memory chip manages to convey, with feelings and emotions, the recorded experiences the cyborg had when she was the companion of Jiro. The viewer may thus be quite impressed with the capabilities and positive effects of having a brain-chip implanted in one's cranium. The movie, apart from the romance or perhaps precisely because of it, thus reads as a brain-implant advertisement. For those unaware of the dangers brain implants have in regards to individuality and personal control over one's own life, I recommend to reader to watch the next informative youtube videos:

The Brain Chip - A Prison For Your Mind


Re: The Brain Chip - The US Has Ordered Millions of Them


Caller: Transhumanist on the Brain Chip


Brainchip: A Warning from a Mason

n 1948 Norbert Weiner published a book, Cybernetics, defined as a neurological communication and control theory already in use in small circles at that time. Yoneji Masuda, "Father of the Information Society," stated his concern in 1980 that our liberty is threatened Orwellian-style by cybernetic technology totally unknown to most people. This technology links the brains of people via implanted microchips to satellites controlled by ground-based supercomputers.

[...]

The mass media has not reported that an implanted person's privacy vanishes for the rest of his or her life. She can be manipulated in many ways. Using different frequencies, the secret controller of this equipment can even change a person's emotional life. She can be made aggressive or lethargic. Sexuality can be artificially influenced. Thought signals and subconscious thinking can be read, dreams affected and even induced, all without the knowledge or consent of the implanted person.

[...]

Are we ready for the robotization of mankind and the total elimination of privacy, including freedom of thought? How many of us would want to cede our entire life, including our most secret thoughts, to Big Brother? Yet the technology exists to create a totalitarian New World Order. Covert neurological communication systems are in place to counteract independent thinking and to control social and political activity on behalf of self-serving private and military interests.

Microchip Implants, Mind Control, and Cybernetics

For more information on the very real dangers of neural implants, please check the reference list.

I believe that the purpose of movies such as Cyborg Girl is to help bridge the gap between sentient man and the soulless machine and make it more attractive for people to accept implants that directly interface with the human nervous system. Although there are certain benefits to be enjoyed by augmenting nervous systems in case they have been compromised say by, for instance, paralysis or neuro-degenerative diseases, regarding the preservation of privacy and individuality however, brain chips pose a tremendous danger to humanity if such technology is administered by an tyrannical regime in an Orwellian police state setting.

Movies such as Cyborg Girl leaves me with the impression that the people behind its production either naively ride along on the infectious and fashionable wave of pro-technological culture and are unaware of the inherent dangers invasive neural implants bring on boardor they work along a more sinister futurist political agenda and through this movie contribute to predictively program naive viewers into a mindset favorable for what they believe is a desirable but no less totalitarian society.



References:

1. Microchip Implants, Mind Control, and Cybernetics


2. Hillary Clinton: Chips will be put in kids’ brains


3. More youtube videos on the brainchip


4. We The People Will Not Be Chipped!

Appendix - The Time Line of Cyborg Girl:

1. Jiro is visited by an unknown girl from the future (2007). Girl stays shortly and then goes away.


2. Jiro lives his life without the companionship of a cyborg and experiences all kinds of life-threatening disasters and witnesses all kinds of unpleasantness. As such, Jiro lives a life of pain and misery.


3. At the end of his life (2061), Jiro succeeds in creating a cyborg that looks just like the real life girl who visited him, as mentioned in point 1. The cyborg is built and programmed to function as the protector of Jiro and help prevent all the bad things he experienced or witnessed in his life.


4. Jiro sends his cyborg girl a year after the real life girl visited Jiro.


5. The cyborg assists and protects Jiro and therefore this version of Jiro's life is fundamentally different from the one described in point 2. Call it a second parallelly lived life of Jiro, if you will.


6. The cyborg is destroyed during the Tokyo earthquake.


7. The unknown girl from the future, mentioned in point 1, intrigued by the similarity of the cyborg decides to go back in time and take over the role of the destroyed cyborg as Jiro's companion ("because she can feel his heart").


8. Jiro and his real life companion live happily ever after.

The contradiction in the story surfaces if one realizes the that the story is a non-linear story in that Jiro "lives out" two parallel lives. This situation is given by the following vintage rendition:

Apart from the physical difficulties of the existence of event altering time-travel, to make the story consistent the time-machine that sent the cyborg girl to help Jiro out in his troubled "Life 1" must also be invoked to take back the destroyed cyborg so that its memory chip can be retrieved from the "Life 2" back to "Life 1" time-line.