The New Film Couldn't Be More Bizarre Than the Science Fiction Psychological Drama It's Inspired By

Greek avant-garde director Yorgos Lanthimos has built a reputation on highly unusual movies. The narratives he creates are weird, such as The Lobster, a film where singletons must partner up or face changed into beasts. In adapting another creator's story, he frequently picks basis material that’s pretty odd also — more bizarre, possibly, than the version he creates. Such was the situation regarding the recent Poor Things, a screen interpretation of author Alasdair Gray's gloriously perverse novel, an empowering, sex-positive take on Frankenstein. The director's adaptation is good, but in a way, his particular flavor of eccentricity and the author's balance each other.

His New Adaptation

Lanthimos’ next pick to interpret also came from far out in left field. The source text for Bugonia, his recent collaboration with acclaimed performer Emma Stone, is 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a perplexing Korean genre stew of science fiction, black comedy, horror, irony, dark psychodrama, and cop drama. The movie is odd less because of its subject matter — even if that's far from normal — but for the wild intensity of its tone and narrative approach. It's an insane journey.

A Korean Cinema Explosion

There must have been a certain energy across Korea in the early 2000s. Save the Green Planet!, the work of Jang Joon-hwan, was included in a boom of audacious in style, innovative movies by emerging talents of filmmakers such as Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook. It was released alongside the director's Memories of Murder and the filmmaker's Oldboy. Save the Green Planet! doesn't quite match up as those celebrated works, but there are similarities with them: extreme violence, dark comedy, sharp societal critique, and genre subversion.

The Story Develops

Save the Green Planet! is about a troubled protagonist who abducts a business tycoon, thinking he's an extraterrestrial originating in another galaxy, intent on world domination. At first, that idea is presented as slapstick humor, and the lead, Lee Byeong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun known for Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), appears as an endearing eccentric. He and his childlike entertainer girlfriend Su-ni (the star) sport black PVC ponchos and bizarre masks fitted with psyche-protection gear, and use balm in combat. Yet they accomplish in abducting drunken CEO Kang Man-shik (actor Baek) and bringing him to a secluded location, a ramshackle house/lab assembled on an old mine amid the hills, where he keeps bees.

Shifting Tones

Hereafter, the narrative turns into ever more unsettling. Lee fastens Kang to a budget-Cronenberg torture chair and subjects him to harm while declaiming absurd conspiracy theories, ultimately forcing the gentle Su-ni away. However, Kang isn't helpless; powered only by the certainty of his elevated status, he is willing and able to subject himself horrifying ordeals just to try to escape and lord it over the clearly unwell protagonist. Simultaneously, a deeply unimpressive investigation for the kidnapper gets underway. The officers' incompetence and incompetence is reminiscent of Memories of Murder, even if the similarity might be accidental in a movie with plotting that appears haphazard and improvised.

A Frenetic Journey

Save the Green Planet! continues racing ahead, propelled by its wild momentum, defying conventions underfoot, long after it seems likely it to either settle down or lose energy. Occasionally it feels as a character study on instability and pharmaceutical abuse; at other times it becomes a fantasy allegory about the callousness of capitalism; alternately it serves as a grimy basement horror or an incompetent police story. Jang Joon-hwan maintains a consistent degree of intense focus throughout, and Shin Ha-kyun is excellent, while Lee Byeong-gu continuously shifts between visionary, endearing eccentric, and frightening madman in response to the narrative's fluidity in tone, perspective, and plot. One could argue it's by design, not a mistake, but it might feel pretty disorienting.

Designed to Confuse

Jang probably consciously intended to disorient his audience, indeed. Similar to numerous Korean films during that period, Save the Green Planet! is driven by a gleeful, maximalist disrespect for genre limits in one aspect, and a profound fury about human cruelty on the other. It stands as a loud proclamation of a nation establishing its international presence alongside fresh commercial and social changes. It promises to be intriguing to witness Lanthimos' perspective on the original plot through a modern Western lens — perhaps, a contrasting viewpoint.

Save the Green Planet! is available to stream without charge.