The New Film Can't Possibly Be More Bizarre Than the Sci-Fi Psychodrama It's Inspired By
Aegean surrealist director Yorgos Lanthimos has built a reputation on distinctly odd movies. The narratives he creates veer into the bizarre, like The Lobster, where unattached individuals need to find love or face changed into beasts. In adapting existing material, he tends to draw from basis material that’s quite peculiar also — more bizarre, possibly, than the version he creates. Such was the situation with 2023’s Poor Things, an adaptation of the novel by Alasdair Gray wonderfully twisted novel, an empowering, open-minded reimagining of Frankenstein. The director's adaptation is good, but partially, his unique brand of eccentricity and Gray’s cancel each other out.
Lanthimos’ Next Pick
The filmmaker's subsequent choice to interpret also came from the fringes. The source text for Bugonia, his newest collaboration with leading actress Emma Stone, is 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a perplexing Korean fusion of sci-fi, black comedy, terror, satire, dark psychodrama, and cop drama. The movie is odd less because of its subject matter — although that's decidedly unusual — rather because of the frenzied excess of its mood and directorial method. It's an insane journey.
The Burst of Korean Film
There must have been something in the air within the country in the early 2000s. Save the Green Planet!, written and directed by Jang Joon-hwan, was included in a surge of stylistically bold, groundbreaking movies from fresh voices of filmmakers such as Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It came out alongside the director's Memories of Murder and Park’s Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! doesn't quite match up as those celebrated works, but there are similarities with them: extreme violence, dark comedy, pointed observations, and bending rules.
The Plot Unfolds
Save the Green Planet! revolves around a disturbed young man who captures a chemical-company executive, convinced he is an extraterrestrial hailing from Andromeda, with plans to invade Earth. At first, this concept is played as slapstick humor, and the lead, Lee Byeong-gu (the actor Shin known for Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), seems like a charmingly misguided figure. Alongside his innocent circus-performer girlfriend Su-ni (the star) wear slick rainwear and absurd helmets encrusted with psyche-protection gear, and wield ointment for defense. But they do succeed in abducting drunken CEO Kang Man-shik (actor Baek) and taking him to Byeong-gu’s remote property, a dilapidated building assembled in a former excavation in a rural area, which houses his beehives.
Growing Tension
Moving forward, the film veers quickly into something more grotesque. The protagonist ties Kang to a budget-Cronenberg torture chair and physically abuses him while declaiming outlandish ideas, ultimately forcing the innocent partner away. Yet the captive is resilient; powered only by the certainty of his elevated status, he is prepared and capable to undergo horrifying ordeals just to try to escape and dominate the clearly unwell younger man. Meanwhile, a comically inadequate investigation for the abductor commences. The officers' incompetence and lack of skill echoes Memories of Murder, although the similarity might be accidental within a story with a narrative that seems slapdash and improvised.
Constant Shifts
Save the Green Planet! just keeps barrelling onward, driven by its wild momentum, defying conventions underfoot, even when you might expect it to calm down or run out of steam. Sometimes it seems as a character study on instability and pharmaceutical abuse; in parts it transforms into a symbolic tale about the callousness of capitalism; in turns it's a grimy basement horror or an incompetent police story. The filmmaker brings the same level of hysterical commitment throughout, and the lead actor delivers a standout performance, while the character of Byeong-gu continuously shifts between savant prophet, charming oddball, and frightening madman depending on the movie’s constant shifts across style, angle, and events. One could argue this is intentional, not a bug, but it may prove rather bewildering.
Purposeful Chaos
Jang probably consciously intended to disorient his audience, mind. Similar to numerous Korean films from that era, Save the Green Planet! draws energy from a joyful, extreme defiance for genre limits in one aspect, and a profound fury about societal brutality in another respect. It’s a roaring expression of a society finding its global voice alongside fresh commercial and cultural freedoms. It will be fascinating to observe the director's interpretation of the same story through a modern Western lens — arguably, the other end of the telescope.
Save the Green Planet! is available to stream for free.
