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

Aegean avant-garde director Yorgos Lanthimos has built a reputation on highly unusual movies. His original stories veer into the bizarre, such as The Lobster, in which singletons need to find love or face transformed into creatures. In adapting existing material, he frequently picks basis material that’s pretty odd as well — stranger, maybe, than his cinematic take. This proved true with 2023’s Poor Things, a film version of Alasdair Gray’s delightfully aberrant novel, a pro-female, sex-positive spin on Frankenstein. His film is good, but in a way, his particular flavor of eccentricity and the novelist's neutralize one another.

Lanthimos’ Next Pick

Lanthimos’ next pick to interpret also came from unexpected territory. The original work for Bugonia, his recent team-up with leading actress Emma Stone, is 2004’s Save the Green Planet!, a confounding Korean fusion of sci-fi, black comedy, horror, satire, psychological thriller, and police procedural. It’s a strange film less because of its plot — although that's decidedly unusual — but due to the frenzied excess of its atmosphere and narrative approach. It's an insane journey.

A Korean Cinema Explosion

It seems there was a certain energy across Korea at the start of the millennium. Save the Green Planet!, written and directed by Jang Joon-hwan, belonged to an explosion of daringly creative, groundbreaking movies from fresh voices 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 iconic films, but there are similarities with them: graphic brutality, dark comedy, sharp societal critique, and defying expectations.

Narrative Progression

Save the Green Planet! revolves around an unhinged individual who captures a chemical-company executive, thinking he's an extraterrestrial hailing from Andromeda, with plans to invade Earth. At first, the premise unfolds as slapstick humor, and the lead, Lee Byeong-gu (the actor Shin from Park’s Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), comes across as a lovably deluded fool. Alongside his naive circus-performer girlfriend Su-ni (Hwang Jung-min) don slick rainwear and ridiculous headgear adorned with anti-mind-control devices, and employ menthol rub for defense. Yet they accomplish in abducting inebriated businessman Kang Man-shik (the performer) and bringing him to the protagonist's isolated home, a ramshackle house/lab he’s built in a former excavation amid the hills, where he keeps bees.

Shifting Tones

From this point, the narrative turns into something more grotesque. Lee fastens Kang onto a crude contraption and inflicts pain while spouting bizarre plots, eventually driving the innocent partner away. Yet the captive is resilient; powered only by the certainty of his innate dominance, he is willing and able to undergo terrifying trials just to try to escape and exert power over the disturbed kidnapper. At the same time, a notably inept investigation for the abductor begins. The detectives' foolishness and clumsiness recalls Memories of Murder, even if it’s not so clearly intentional within a story with a plot that seems slapdash and unrehearsed.

A Frenetic Journey

Save the Green Planet! just keeps barrelling onward, propelled by its manic force, trampling genre norms along the way, long after one would assume it to calm down or falter. Occasionally it feels as a character study about mental health and excessive drug use; sometimes it’s a metaphorical narrative regarding the indifference of capitalism; sometimes it’s a claustrophobic thriller or an incompetent police story. Director Jang maintains a consistent degree of hysterical commitment in all scenes, and the performer delivers a standout performance, even though the protagonist keeps morphing among visionary, charming oddball, and dangerous lunatic in response to the film's ever-changing tone in mood, viewpoint, and story. One could argue that’s a feature, not a flaw, but it may prove pretty disorienting.

Purposeful Chaos

Jang probably consciously intended to unsettle spectators, mind. In line with various Korean films of its time, Save the Green Planet! is powered by a gleeful, maximalist disrespect for stylistic boundaries in one aspect, and a profound fury about man’s inhumanity to man in another respect. The film is a vibrant manifestation of a culture finding its global voice during emerging financial and cultural freedoms. It will be fascinating to see how Lanthimos views this narrative through a modern Western lens — possibly, a contrasting viewpoint.

Save the Green Planet! is accessible for viewing without charge.