The New Film Isn't Likely to Be More Bizarre Than the Sci-Fi Psychodrama It's Based On
Aegean avant-garde director Yorgos Lanthimos has built a reputation on extremely strange movies. His unique screenplays veer into the bizarre, such as The Lobster, where single people need to find love or else be being turned into animals. When he adapts existing material, he tends to draw from source material that’s pretty odd too — odder, possibly, than the version he creates. This proved true with 2023’s Poor Things, an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s delightfully aberrant novel, an empowering, liberated take on Frankenstein. His film is effective, but to some extent, his specific style of eccentricity and the novelist's balance each other.
Lanthimos’ Next Pick
His following selection to interpret also came from the fringes. The basis for Bugonia, his newest team-up with star Emma Stone, comes from 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a confounding Korean genre stew of science fiction, dark humor, terror, satire, dark psychodrama, and police procedural. It's an unusual piece not primarily due to what it’s about — although that's decidedly unusual — but due to the chaotic extremity of its tone and narrative approach. It's an insane journey.
A New Wave of Filmmaking
There likely existed a creative spirit within the country in the early 2000s. Save the Green Planet!, helmed by Jang Joon-hwan, was included in a surge of audacious in style, groundbreaking movies from a new generation of filmmakers including Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It came out concurrently with Bong’s Memories of Murder and Park’s Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! isn't as acclaimed as those celebrated works, but there are similarities with them: graphic brutality, dark comedy, bitter social commentary, and bending rules.
Narrative Progression
Save the Green Planet! is about a troubled protagonist who captures a chemical-company executive, thinking he's an alien from the planet Andromeda, intent on world domination. Initially, that idea is presented as farce, and the young man, Lee Byeong-gu (the actor Shin from Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), seems like an endearing eccentric. He and his naive entertainer girlfriend Su-ni (Hwang Jung-min) don plastic capes and absurd helmets fitted with anti-mind-control devices, and wield balm in combat. But they do succeed in seizing drunken CEO Kang Man-shik (the performer) and bringing him to the protagonist's isolated home, a ramshackle house/lab assembled in a former excavation in the mountains, which houses his beehives.
A Descent into Darkness
Hereafter, the narrative turns into something more grotesque. The protagonist ties Kang onto a crude contraption and physically abuses him while spouting bizarre plots, eventually driving the gentle Su-ni away. But Kang is no victim; fueled entirely by the conviction of his elevated status, he can and will to undergo terrifying trials in hopes of breaking free and lord it over the disturbed kidnapper. Simultaneously, a comically inadequate investigation to find the criminal begins. The detectives' foolishness and incompetence recalls Memories of Murder, even if it’s not so clearly intentional in a movie with plotting that seems slapdash and improvised.
Unrelenting Pace
Save the Green Planet! just keeps barrelling onward, driven by its manic force, breaking rules without pause, well past it seems likely it to find stability or run out of steam. Sometimes it seems as a character study about mental health and pharmaceutical abuse; in parts it transforms into a fantasy allegory about the callousness of capitalism; in turns it's a grimy basement horror or a bumbling detective tale. Director Jang maintains a consistent degree of feverish dedication to every bit, and Shin Ha-kyun shines, even though the protagonist constantly changes from visionary, lovable weirdo, and dangerous lunatic in response to the narrative's fluidity in tone, perspective, and plot. One could argue it's by design, not a bug, but it might feel pretty disorienting.
Designed to Confuse
The director likely meant to unsettle spectators, indeed. Similar to numerous Korean films during that period, Save the Green Planet! is powered by an exuberant rejection for artistic rules in one aspect, and a quite sincere anger about societal brutality on the other. It stands as a loud proclamation of a culture finding its global voice amid new economic and social changes. It promises to be intriguing to see Lanthimos' perspective on this narrative from a current U.S. standpoint — arguably, the other end of the telescope.
Save the Green Planet! can be viewed online for free.
