The New Film Couldn't Be More Bizarre Than the Science Fiction Psychological Drama It's Based On
Aegean avant-garde director Yorgos Lanthimos has built a reputation on distinctly odd movies. The narratives he creates veer into the bizarre, such as The Lobster, in which singletons are compelled to form relationships or else be changed into beasts. Whenever he interprets existing material, he often selects original works that’s pretty odd as well — stranger, maybe, than his adaptation of it. Such was the situation for last year's Poor Things, a film version of Alasdair Gray’s gloriously perverse novel, a feminist, liberated take on Frankenstein. Lanthimos’ version is effective, but to some extent, his particular flavor of oddity and the novelist's cancel each other out.
The Director's Latest Choice
His following selection for adaptation similarly emerged from unexpected territory. The source text for Bugonia, his newest team-up with acclaimed performer Emma Stone, is 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a bewildering Korean genre stew of sci-fi, dark humor, horror, satire, psychological thriller, and police procedural. It’s a strange film not so much for what it’s about — although that's far from normal — but for the chaotic extremity of its mood and narrative approach. The film is a rollercoaster.
A New Wave of Filmmaking
There likely existed something in the air across Korea during that period. Save the Green Planet!, the work of Jang Joon-hwan, was part of a boom of audacious in style, boundary-pushing movies by emerging talents of filmmakers such as Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It debuted alongside Bong’s Memories of Murder and Park’s Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! isn’t on the same level as those celebrated works, but there are similarities with them: graphic brutality, morbid humor, bitter social commentary, and bending rules.
The Story Develops
Save the Green Planet! is about an unhinged individual who kidnaps a business tycoon, thinking he's a being hailing from Andromeda, with plans to invade Earth. Early on, the premise unfolds as farce, and the protagonist, Lee Byeong-gu (the performer from Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), appears as a charmingly misguided figure. Together with his naive acrobat girlfriend Su-ni (the star) sport plastic capes and absurd helmets adorned with anti-mind-control devices, and use balm for defense. Yet they accomplish in seizing inebriated businessman Kang Man-shik (Baek Yun-shik) and bringing him to the protagonist's isolated home, a dilapidated building he’s built in a former excavation amid the hills, where he keeps bees.
A Descent into Darkness
From this point, the film veers quickly into ever more unsettling. Byeong-gu straps Kang to a budget-Cronenberg torture chair and physically abuses him while declaiming outlandish ideas, eventually driving the gentle Su-ni away. Yet the captive is resilient; fueled entirely by the belief of his own superiority, he is willing and able to endure horrifying ordeals to attempt an exit and lord it over the disturbed kidnapper. Simultaneously, a comically inadequate police hunt to find the criminal begins. The detectives' foolishness and clumsiness is reminiscent of Memories of Murder, though the similarity might be accidental in a movie with a narrative that seems slapdash and improvised.
A Frenetic Journey
Save the Green Planet! just keeps barrelling onward, propelled by its wild momentum, trampling genre norms without pause, long after one would assume it to calm down or lose energy. Sometimes it seems like a serious story regarding psychological issues and excessive drug use; sometimes it’s a symbolic tale about the callousness of capitalism; in turns it's a claustrophobic thriller or a sloppy cop movie. Jang Joon-hwan applies equal measure of intense focus in all scenes, and Shin Ha-kyun is excellent, while the protagonist constantly changes among savant prophet, endearing eccentric, and frightening madman in response to the film's ever-changing tone in mood, viewpoint, and story. I think it's by design, not a flaw, but it might feel pretty disorienting.
Intentional Disorientation
The director likely meant to confuse viewers, indeed. In line with various Korean films of its time, Save the Green Planet! is powered by a joyful, extreme defiance for genre limits in one aspect, and a quite sincere anger about man’s inhumanity to man in another respect. It’s a roaring expression of a society gaining worldwide recognition during emerging financial and artistic liberties. It promises to be intriguing to witness how Lanthimos views the same story from contemporary America — perhaps, an opposite perspective.
Save the Green Planet! is accessible for viewing for free.
