The New Film Isn't Likely to Be Stranger Than the Sci-Fi Psychological Drama It's Adapted From
Aegean avant-garde filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is known for extremely strange movies. His unique screenplays veer into the bizarre, like The Lobster, a film where singletons need to find love or else be being turned into animals. When he adapts another creator's story, he tends to draw from basis material that’s rather eccentric as well — stranger, maybe, than his cinematic take. This proved true with 2023’s Poor Things, an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s gloriously perverse novel, an empowering, sex-positive spin on Frankenstein. Lanthimos’ version is good, but to some extent, his unique brand of weirdness and the novelist's cancel each other out.
The Director's Latest Choice
The filmmaker's subsequent choice to bring to screen 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 confounding Korean genre stew of sci-fi, dark humor, terror, irony, dark psychodrama, and police procedural. It's an unusual piece not so much for what it’s about — even if that's highly unconventional — rather because of the wild intensity of its atmosphere and directorial method. It's an insane journey.
A New Wave of Filmmaking
There must have been something in the air in South Korea at the start of the millennium. Save the Green Planet!, the work of Jang Joon-hwan, was part of a surge of audacious in style, groundbreaking movies from fresh voices of filmmakers such as Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It came out alongside Bong’s Memories of Murder and Park’s Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! isn’t on the same level as those iconic films, but it’s got a lot in common with them: extreme violence, dark comedy, pointed observations, and genre subversion.
The Plot Unfolds
Save the Green Planet! focuses on a troubled protagonist who kidnaps a corporate CEO, convinced he is an alien hailing from Andromeda, plotting an attack. Initially, that idea is played as farce, and the protagonist, Lee Byeong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun from Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), seems like a lovably deluded fool. Alongside his naive circus-performer girlfriend Su-ni (the star) wear slick rainwear and bizarre masks encrusted with psyche-protection gear, and wield menthol rub in combat. However, they manage in kidnapping inebriated businessman Kang Man-shik (the performer) and transporting him to Byeong-gu’s remote property, a dilapidated building he’s built on an old mine amid the hills, 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 subjects him to harm while ranting outlandish ideas, finally pushing the gentle Su-ni away. However, Kang isn't helpless; fueled entirely by the conviction of his innate dominance, he is willing and able to subject himself terrifying trials just to try to escape and exert power over the clearly unwell protagonist. At the same time, a deeply unimpressive investigation for the kidnapper begins. The cops’ witlessness and clumsiness is reminiscent of Memories of Murder, although it’s not so clearly intentional in a movie with a plot that seems slapdash and improvised.
Constant Shifts
Save the Green Planet! plunges forward relentlessly, fueled by its own crazed energy, breaking rules underfoot, long after one would assume it to either settle down or run out of steam. At moments it appears like a serious story regarding psychological issues and excessive drug use; at other times it becomes a metaphorical narrative about the callousness of the economic system; sometimes it’s a claustrophobic thriller or a bumbling detective tale. The filmmaker brings the same level of intense focus in all scenes, and Shin Ha-kyun shines, while the protagonist constantly changes among savant prophet, lovable weirdo, and terrifying psycho depending on the film's ever-changing tone across style, angle, and events. It seems that’s a feature, not a bug, but it may prove rather bewildering.
Purposeful Chaos
The director likely meant to unsettle spectators, mind. Similar to numerous Korean films during that period, Save the Green Planet! draws energy from a joyful, extreme defiance for artistic rules partly, and a quite sincere anger about man’s inhumanity to man on the other. It stands as a loud proclamation of a society establishing its international presence during emerging financial and cultural freedoms. It promises to be intriguing to observe the director's interpretation of the same story from contemporary America — arguably, the other end of the telescope.
Save the Green Planet! is available to stream at no cost.
