The New Film Couldn't Be More Bizarre Than the Sci-Fi Psychodrama It's Based On
Aegean avant-garde filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has built a reputation on highly unusual movies. The narratives he creates defy convention, like The Lobster, a film where unattached individuals need to find love or face being turned into animals. In adapting someone else’s work, he frequently picks source material that’s pretty odd too — odder, possibly, than his cinematic take. This proved true with 2023’s Poor Things, a screen interpretation of author Alasdair Gray's delightfully aberrant novel, a pro-female, open-minded reimagining of Frankenstein. The director's adaptation is effective, but to some extent, his specific style of weirdness and Gray’s balance each other.
The Director's Latest Choice
Lanthimos’ next pick to interpret also came from the fringes. The source text for Bugonia, his recent project alongside acclaimed performer Emma Stone, is 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a confounding Korean genre stew of science fiction, black comedy, horror, satire, psychological thriller, and police procedural. The movie is odd not so much for what it’s about — even if that's far from normal — but for the chaotic extremity of its atmosphere and narrative approach. It’s a wild, wild ride.
A New Wave of Filmmaking
It seems there was a creative spirit within the country in the early 2000s. Save the Green Planet!, written and directed by Jang Joon-hwan, belonged to a boom of daringly creative, groundbreaking movies from fresh voices of filmmakers such as Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It was released the same year as the director's Memories of Murder and Park’s Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! isn’t on the same level as those iconic films, but there are similarities with them: graphic brutality, dark comedy, pointed observations, and genre subversion.
Narrative Progression
Save the Green Planet! focuses on an unhinged individual who kidnaps a corporate CEO, believing he’s a being hailing from Andromeda, with plans to invade Earth. Initially, the premise unfolds as broad comedy, and the young man, Lee Byeong-gu (the performer known for Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), seems like a charmingly misguided figure. Alongside his naive circus-performer girlfriend Su-ni (Hwang Jung-min) sport black PVC ponchos and bizarre masks fitted with anti-mind-control devices, and employ balm as a weapon. But they do succeed in seizing inebriated businessman Kang Man-shik (the performer) and taking him to a secluded location, a dilapidated building constructed in a former excavation in a rural area, home to his apiary.
Shifting Tones
Hereafter, the film veers quickly into ever more unsettling. Byeong-gu straps Kang to a budget-Cronenberg torture chair and inflicts pain while declaiming outlandish ideas, ultimately forcing the gentle Su-ni away. But Kang is no victim; powered only by the conviction of his elevated status, he is willing and able to endure terrifying trials in hopes of breaking free and exert power over the disturbed protagonist. Meanwhile, a notably inept manhunt for the abductor begins. The officers' incompetence and lack of skill recalls Memories of Murder, although it may not be as deliberate in a movie with a plot that seems slapdash and improvised.
Constant Shifts
Save the Green Planet! plunges forward relentlessly, driven by its manic force, breaking rules without pause, well past you might expect it to find stability or run out of steam. Occasionally it feels like a serious story regarding psychological issues and overmedication; sometimes it’s a fantasy allegory regarding the indifference of the economic system; alternately it serves as a grimy basement horror or an incompetent police story. Jang Joon-hwan maintains a consistent degree of hysterical commitment to every bit, and the performer is excellent, even though the character of Byeong-gu keeps morphing from wise seer, charming oddball, and dangerous lunatic depending on the film's ever-changing tone across style, angle, and events. It seems it's by design, not a bug, but it might feel rather bewildering.
Intentional Disorientation
The director likely meant to disorient his audience, of course. In line with various Korean films of its time, Save the Green Planet! is driven by an exuberant rejection for genre limits partly, and a quite sincere anger about man’s inhumanity to man in another respect. It stands as a loud proclamation of a nation finding its global voice amid new economic and cultural freedoms. One can look forward to witness how Lanthimos views the original plot from a current U.S. standpoint — possibly, the other end of the telescope.
Save the Green Planet! can be viewed online for free.
