The New Film Can't Possibly Be Weirder Than the Sci-Fi Psychodrama It's Inspired By
Greek surrealist filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has built a reputation on distinctly odd movies. His original stories are weird, such as The Lobster, a film where unattached individuals need to find love or risk being turned into animals. When he adapts someone else’s work, he tends to draw from source material that’s rather eccentric too — odder, perhaps, than his adaptation of it. Such was the situation for last year's Poor Things, a film version of the novel by Alasdair Gray gloriously perverse novel, an empowering, open-minded spin on Frankenstein. His film is effective, but in a way, his particular flavor of weirdness and Gray’s cancel each other out.
The Director's Latest Choice
Lanthimos’ next pick for adaptation was likewise drawn from the fringes. The original work for Bugonia, his latest team-up with acclaimed performer Emma Stone, is 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a confounding Korean genre stew of science fiction, black comedy, terror, satire, dark psychodrama, and police procedural. The movie is odd not so much for what it’s about — even if that's highly unconventional — rather because of the frenzied excess of its mood and narrative approach. It's an insane journey.
A Korean Cinema Explosion
There must have been something in the air in South Korea in the early 2000s. Save the Green Planet!, written and directed by Jang Joon-hwan, belonged to a boom of stylistically bold, groundbreaking movies from fresh voices of filmmakers such as Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It came out the same year as the director's Memories of Murder and the filmmaker'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: graphic brutality, dark comedy, pointed observations, and bending rules.
The Plot Unfolds
Save the Green Planet! focuses on an unhinged individual who captures a corporate CEO, convinced he is an alien hailing from Andromeda, plotting an attack. At first, the premise is presented as slapstick humor, 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. Alongside his innocent entertainer girlfriend Su-ni (Hwang Jung-min) wear plastic capes and ridiculous headgear adorned with anti-mind-control devices, and employ balm in combat. However, they manage in seizing drunken CEO Kang Man-shik (actor Baek) and taking him to Byeong-gu’s remote property, a dilapidated building he’s built on an old mine in a rural area, which houses his beehives.
A Descent into Darkness
From this point, the story shifts abruptly into something more grotesque. The protagonist ties Kang onto a crude contraption and inflicts pain while declaiming outlandish ideas, ultimately forcing the innocent partner away. But Kang is no victim; fueled entirely by the certainty of his elevated status, he is prepared and capable to subject himself terrifying trials just to try to escape and dominate the mentally unstable protagonist. Meanwhile, a comically inadequate investigation for the abductor gets underway. The detectives' foolishness and clumsiness recalls Memories of Murder, though it’s not so clearly intentional within a story with a plot that seems slapdash and improvised.
A Frenetic Journey
Save the Green Planet! plunges forward relentlessly, fueled by its own crazed energy, trampling genre norms without pause, even when you might expect it to either settle down or lose energy. Sometimes it seems to be a drama regarding psychological issues and excessive drug use; sometimes it’s a metaphorical narrative on the cruelty of capitalism; in turns it's a claustrophobic thriller or a sloppy cop movie. Director Jang maintains a consistent degree of feverish dedication to every bit, and Shin Ha-kyun shines, even though Lee Byeong-gu continuously shifts from visionary, charming oddball, and terrifying psycho in response to the film's ever-changing tone in tone, perspective, and plot. I think it's by design, not a flaw, but it may prove rather bewildering.
Intentional Disorientation
It's plausible Jang aimed to disorient his audience, mind. Similar to numerous Korean films of its time, Save the Green Planet! is driven by a gleeful, maximalist disrespect for stylistic boundaries on one side, and a quite sincere anger about societal brutality additionally. The film is a vibrant manifestation of a nation establishing its international presence amid new economic and cultural freedoms. One can look forward to witness Lanthimos' perspective on the same story from a current U.S. standpoint — perhaps, an opposite perspective.
Save the Green Planet! is available to stream at no cost.
