Greek avant-garde filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos specializes in extremely strange movies. The narratives he creates are weird, such as The Lobster, in which unattached individuals need to find love or else be being turned into animals. When he adapts existing material, he often selects basis material that’s quite peculiar as well — stranger, perhaps, than the version he creates. Such was the situation for last year's Poor Things, a screen interpretation of Alasdair Gray’s wonderfully twisted novel, an empowering, open-minded reimagining of Frankenstein. Lanthimos’ version is effective, but in a way, his specific style of oddity and the novelist's cancel each other out.
The Director's Latest Choice
The filmmaker's subsequent choice to interpret also came from unexpected territory. The source text for Bugonia, his latest project alongside acclaimed performer Emma Stone, comes from 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a bewildering Korean mix of styles of sci-fi, dark humor, terror, irony, psychological thriller, and cop drama. It's an unusual piece not so much for its subject matter — even if that's far from normal — but for the frenzied excess of its mood and storytelling style. It's an insane journey.
A Korean Cinema Explosion
There likely existed a creative spirit in South Korea in the early 2000s. Save the Green Planet!, helmed by Jang Joon-hwan, belonged to an explosion of daringly creative, boundary-pushing movies from a new generation of filmmakers such as Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It was released alongside Bong’s Memories of Murder and the filmmaker's Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! isn’t on the same level as those two crime masterpieces, but it’s got a lot in common with them: graphic brutality, dark comedy, pointed observations, and defying expectations.
Narrative Progression
Save the Green Planet! focuses on a disturbed young man who captures a business tycoon, believing he’s an extraterrestrial hailing from Andromeda, intent on world domination. Early on, the premise unfolds as broad comedy, and the lead, Lee Byeong-gu (the actor Shin known for Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), appears as an endearing eccentric. Together with his naive acrobat girlfriend Su-ni (the star) wear plastic capes and ridiculous headgear fitted with psyche-protection gear, and employ balm in combat. However, they manage in kidnapping inebriated businessman Kang Man-shik (actor Baek) and taking him to the protagonist's isolated home, a ramshackle house/lab assembled at a mining site amid the hills, which houses his beehives.
A Descent into Darkness
Moving forward, the film veers quickly into something more grotesque. The protagonist ties Kang into a makeshift device and physically abuses him while declaiming absurd conspiracy theories, eventually driving the gentle Su-ni away. But Kang is no victim; fueled entirely by the belief of his own superiority, he is prepared and capable to endure horrifying ordeals in hopes of breaking free and dominate the clearly unwell protagonist. Meanwhile, a notably inept police hunt to find the criminal commences. The cops’ witlessness and lack of skill recalls Memories of Murder, even if it may not be as deliberate within a story with plotting that comes off as rushed and spontaneous.
A Frenetic Journey
Save the Green Planet! continues racing ahead, propelled by its manic force, trampling genre norms underfoot, well past it seems likely it to either settle down or lose energy. At moments it appears like a serious story about mental health and excessive drug use; at other times it becomes a metaphorical narrative regarding the indifference of capitalism; alternately it serves as a dirty, tense scare-fest or a bumbling detective tale. Director Jang brings the same level of feverish dedication to every bit, and the performer shines, although the protagonist continuously shifts among savant prophet, charming oddball, and frightening madman as required by the movie’s constant shifts in mood, viewpoint, and story. It seems it's by design, not a mistake, but it may prove pretty disorienting.
Purposeful Chaos
It's plausible Jang aimed to unsettle spectators, mind. Similar to numerous Korean films of its time, Save the Green Planet! draws energy from a gleeful, maximalist disrespect for artistic rules on one side, and a quite sincere anger about man’s inhumanity to man on the other. It’s a roaring expression of a society finding its global voice amid new economic and artistic liberties. One can look forward to observe how Lanthimos views the same story from a current U.S. standpoint — arguably, a contrasting viewpoint.
Save the Green Planet! can be viewed online for free.
