I watch a lot of films. Recently I watched Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice.
Man-su is good at one thing. Paper. He built a life around that skill. The company gets bought, people get cut, machines and AI take over more of the work. He cannot land a new role fast enough, so he decides the only way to win is to remove the other candidates. He tells himself it is for his family. The film is darkly funny about that. At the end he gets a job in a plant run mostly by machines. He “wins” and he is alone in a system that barely needs him.
Park has said the AI and automation piece matters to him. The title is also the excuse companies use when they replace people. No other choice.
Where it hit
I am not laid off. I am not in a paper mill. Still, the stress felt familiar in a smaller way.
I care a lot about this craft. Clean code. Clean sites. Design done properly. When work gets heavy, and when AI tools move week to week, it is easy to spiral into competition with other engineers. Who is faster. Who shipped the agent setup first. Who looks more useful in the channel.
That is Man-su’s mistake, scaled down. He fights other humans for a seat while the real shift is the factory changing underneath them.
I have caught myself doing the soft version of that. Refreshing feeds. Comparing output. Treating every new model release like a verdict on whether my standards still matter. They do. Speed is not the same as taste. A generated draft is not a finished interface.
The point I took
“No other choice” is a sentence people use when they have stopped thinking.
In the film it covers murder and corporate automation. In a normal job it covers worse process, endless tools you “have” to adopt, and panic that every pause is career damage.
There is usually another choice. Keep the part of the work that is actually yours. Judgment. Structure. Care for the thing users touch. Use AI where it helps, without turning other people into rivals for a role the tooling is already reshaping.
I liked the movie. I did not like recognizing how easy the excuse is to say out loud.