The New Film Couldn't Be Stranger Than the Science Fiction Psychodrama It's Adapted From
Greek avant-garde filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos specializes in extremely strange movies. His unique screenplays veer into the bizarre, like The Lobster, a film where singletons must partner up or face changed into beasts. When he adapts existing material, he often selects basis material that’s rather eccentric also — more bizarre, maybe, than his adaptation of it. This proved true for last year's Poor Things, a film version of author Alasdair Gray's gloriously perverse novel, an empowering, sex-positive spin on Frankenstein. His film is effective, but to some extent, his unique brand of oddity and the novelist's balance each other.
Lanthimos’ Next Pick
The filmmaker's subsequent choice for adaptation similarly emerged from far out in left field. The basis for Bugonia, his latest collaboration with acclaimed performer Emma Stone, comes from 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a perplexing Korean fusion of sci-fi, dark humor, horror, satire, dark psychodrama, and cop drama. It’s a strange film not primarily due to its subject matter — though that is far from normal — but due to the frenzied excess of its mood and directorial method. It's an insane journey.
A New Wave of Filmmaking
It seems there was something in the air within the country in the early 2000s. Save the Green Planet!, written and directed by Jang Joon-hwan, was part of a surge of stylistically bold, groundbreaking movies from fresh voices of filmmakers like Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It came out concurrently with the director's Memories of Murder and Park’s Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! isn't as acclaimed as those iconic films, but there are similarities with them: graphic brutality, dark comedy, bitter social commentary, and genre subversion.
The Plot Unfolds
Save the Green Planet! focuses on a disturbed young man who abducts a corporate CEO, convinced he is an alien from the planet Andromeda, plotting an attack. Early on, that idea is presented as farce, and the protagonist, Lee Byeong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun known for Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), seems like a charmingly misguided figure. Together with his naive acrobat girlfriend Su-ni (the actress Hwang) sport plastic capes and bizarre masks encrusted with psyche-protection gear, and wield balm in combat. Yet they accomplish in seizing intoxicated executive Kang Man-shik (actor Baek) and taking him to a secluded location, a dilapidated building he’s built in a former excavation in the mountains, which houses his beehives.
Growing Tension
Hereafter, the narrative turns into something more grotesque. Byeong-gu straps Kang to a budget-Cronenberg torture chair and inflicts pain while declaiming outlandish ideas, finally pushing his kind girlfriend away. But Kang is no victim; powered only by the conviction of his own superiority, he is prepared and capable to undergo terrifying trials just to try to escape and lord it over the mentally unstable younger man. Meanwhile, a notably inept investigation for the abductor begins. The detectives' foolishness and clumsiness echoes Memories of Murder, although the similarity might be accidental within a story with a narrative that seems slapdash and unrehearsed.
Unrelenting Pace
Save the Green Planet! just keeps barrelling onward, fueled by its manic force, trampling genre norms underfoot, even when you might expect it to find stability or lose energy. Occasionally it feels like a serious story about mental health and excessive drug use; at other times it becomes a metaphorical narrative on the cruelty of corporate culture; in turns it's a dirty, tense scare-fest or a sloppy cop movie. Director Jang applies equal measure of hysterical commitment to every bit, and the performer delivers a standout performance, even though the protagonist keeps morphing among visionary, lovable weirdo, and terrifying psycho as required by the film's ever-changing tone in tone, perspective, and plot. It seems this is intentional, not a flaw, but it may prove quite confusing.
Purposeful Chaos
Jang probably consciously intended to disorient his audience, of course. Like so many Korean films from that era, Save the Green Planet! is driven by an exuberant rejection for stylistic boundaries partly, and a quite sincere anger about man’s inhumanity to man on the other. The film is a vibrant manifestation of a culture gaining worldwide recognition amid new economic and cultural freedoms. One can look forward to observe the director's interpretation of this narrative through a modern Western lens — possibly, the other end of the telescope.
Save the Green Planet! can be viewed online for free.
