The New Film Couldn't Be Stranger Than the Sci-Fi Psychodrama It's Adapted From
Greek surrealist director Yorgos Lanthimos has built a reputation on distinctly odd movies. His original stories veer into the bizarre, like The Lobster, in which unattached individuals need to find love or risk changed into beasts. In adapting existing material, he often selects original works that’s quite peculiar too — odder, perhaps, 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 pro-female, liberated take on Frankenstein. His film is good, but in a way, his specific style of weirdness and Gray’s neutralize one another.
His New Adaptation
His following selection for adaptation also came from far out in left field. The basis for Bugonia, his latest collaboration with star Emma Stone, comes from 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a confounding Korean mix of styles of science fiction, black comedy, terror, satire, dark psychodrama, and police procedural. The movie is odd not primarily due to its plot — even if that's far from normal — rather because of the frenzied excess of its mood and storytelling style. It's an insane journey.
A New Wave of Filmmaking
There likely existed a creative spirit within the country at the start of the millennium. Save the Green Planet!, the work of Jang Joon-hwan, was part of a surge of stylistically bold, groundbreaking movies from a new generation 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 as acclaimed as those two crime masterpieces, but it’s got a lot in common with them: extreme violence, morbid humor, pointed observations, and genre subversion.
Narrative Progression
Save the Green Planet! is about a disturbed young man who abducts a chemical-company executive, believing he’s an alien from the planet Andromeda, plotting an attack. Early on, the premise is presented as broad comedy, and the protagonist, Lee Byeong-gu (the performer from Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), seems like a charmingly misguided figure. Together with his naive entertainer girlfriend Su-ni (the star) wear black PVC ponchos and ridiculous headgear fitted with psyche-protection gear, and employ menthol rub for defense. But they do succeed in seizing intoxicated executive Kang Man-shik (actor Baek) and transporting him to the protagonist's isolated home, a makeshift laboratory constructed in a former excavation amid the hills, which houses his beehives.
Growing Tension
Hereafter, the film veers quickly into increasingly disturbing. Lee fastens Kang onto a crude contraption and physically abuses him while spouting bizarre plots, finally pushing the gentle Su-ni away. However, Kang isn't helpless; driven solely by the certainty of his innate dominance, he is prepared and capable to subject himself terrifying trials to attempt an exit and exert power over the disturbed protagonist. Simultaneously, a comically inadequate investigation to find the criminal begins. The detectives' foolishness and incompetence recalls Memories of Murder, although it may not be as deliberate in a movie with a narrative that seems slapdash and unrehearsed.
Constant Shifts
Save the Green Planet! continues racing ahead, propelled by its own crazed energy, defying conventions underfoot, long after you might expect it to find stability or run out of steam. Occasionally it feels like a serious story on instability and pharmaceutical abuse; in parts it transforms into a fantasy allegory on the cruelty of the economic system; alternately it serves as a dirty, tense scare-fest or a sloppy cop movie. The filmmaker applies equal measure of intense focus in all scenes, and Shin Ha-kyun is excellent, although Lee Byeong-gu keeps morphing between wise seer, lovable weirdo, and dangerous lunatic as required by the film's ever-changing tone in mood, viewpoint, and story. One could argue that’s a feature, not a bug, but it can be quite confusing.
Purposeful Chaos
The director likely meant to confuse viewers, of course. Like so many Korean films of its time, Save the Green Planet! is driven by a joyful, extreme defiance for artistic rules in one aspect, and a profound fury about human cruelty in another respect. It stands as a loud proclamation of a nation finding its global voice alongside fresh commercial and social changes. It will be fascinating to witness how Lanthimos views the same story through a modern Western lens — arguably, the other end of the telescope.
Save the Green Planet! is accessible for viewing for free.
