The New Film Can't Possibly Be More Bizarre Than the Science Fiction Psychological Drama It's Inspired By
Aegean surrealist director Yorgos Lanthimos specializes in extremely strange movies. His unique screenplays are weird, like The Lobster, a film where unattached individuals need to find love or risk changed into beasts. In adapting someone else’s work, he often selects source material that’s quite peculiar as well — stranger, perhaps, than the version he creates. This proved true for last year's Poor Things, a screen interpretation of author Alasdair Gray's wonderfully twisted novel, a pro-female, sex-positive take on Frankenstein. Lanthimos’ version stands strong, but to some extent, his particular flavor of oddity and Gray’s neutralize one another.
The Director's Latest Choice
Lanthimos’ next pick for adaptation similarly emerged from unexpected territory. The original work for Bugonia, his newest project alongside leading actress Emma Stone, is 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a perplexing Korean mix of styles of sci-fi, dark humor, terror, irony, dark psychodrama, and police procedural. It’s a strange film less because of its subject matter — though that is far from normal — but for the chaotic extremity of its atmosphere and directorial method. It's an insane journey.
A New Wave of Filmmaking
It seems there was a creative spirit across Korea during that period. Save the Green Planet!, helmed by Jang Joon-hwan, belonged to a surge of audacious in style, boundary-pushing movies from a new generation of filmmakers including Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It debuted the same year as the director's Memories of Murder and the filmmaker's Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! doesn't quite match up as those two crime masterpieces, but it’s got a lot in common with them: graphic brutality, morbid humor, sharp societal critique, and genre subversion.
The Plot Unfolds
Save the Green Planet! revolves around an unhinged individual who kidnaps a business tycoon, thinking he's a being originating in another galaxy, with plans to invade Earth. At first, this concept unfolds as farce, and the lead, Lee Byeong-gu (the actor Shin from Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), appears as a lovably deluded fool. Together with his childlike acrobat girlfriend Su-ni (the actress Hwang) don slick rainwear and bizarre masks fitted with psyche-protection gear, and employ balm in combat. But they do succeed in seizing intoxicated executive Kang Man-shik (actor Baek) and taking him to Byeong-gu’s remote property, a ramshackle house/lab constructed in a former excavation in a rural area, which houses his beehives.
Shifting Tones
From this point, the narrative turns into increasingly disturbing. Lee fastens Kang into a makeshift device and subjects him to harm while ranting bizarre plots, eventually driving the innocent partner away. But Kang is no victim; driven solely by the conviction of his own superiority, he can and will to undergo horrifying ordeals just to try to escape and exert power over the mentally unstable protagonist. At the same time, a deeply unimpressive investigation to find the criminal begins. The cops’ witlessness and lack of skill recalls Memories of Murder, although it may not be as deliberate in a film with plotting that appears haphazard and spontaneous.
Constant Shifts
Save the Green Planet! continues racing ahead, propelled by its own crazed energy, trampling genre norms along the way, even when one would assume it to calm down or run out of steam. Occasionally it feels like a serious story regarding psychological issues and excessive drug use; sometimes it’s a metaphorical narrative regarding the indifference of capitalism; in turns it's a dirty, tense scare-fest or a sloppy cop movie. The filmmaker maintains a consistent degree of intense focus throughout, and the performer is excellent, while the character of Byeong-gu keeps morphing among visionary, endearing eccentric, and frightening madman depending on the film's ever-changing tone across style, angle, and events. One could argue this is intentional, not a mistake, but it might feel quite confusing.
Designed to Confuse
Jang probably consciously intended to confuse viewers, of course. Similar to numerous Korean films from that era, Save the Green Planet! is driven by a joyful, extreme defiance for stylistic boundaries on one side, and a profound fury about societal brutality in another respect. The film is a vibrant manifestation of a nation establishing its international presence alongside fresh commercial and artistic liberties. It promises to be intriguing to witness the director's interpretation of this narrative through a modern Western lens — arguably, an opposite perspective.
Save the Green Planet! can be viewed online without charge.
