CJ ENM, known for Parasite (2019) in Korea, confirmed the production of Bugonia, a Hollywood remake of the Korean sci-fi comedy/thriller Save the Green Planet (2003), and that you will be at the helm of the project.
Mr. Lanthimos. You stromed onto the international stage with Dogtooth (2009), winning the Un Certain Regard Prize at Cannes, and you have continued to cpativate audiences ever since. Your English-language debut, The Lobster (2015), won the Jury Prize at Cannes. The Favourite (2018) earned ten Oscar nominations, winning Best Actress for Olivia Colman, and Poor Things (2023) received 11 Oscar nominations and won four awards. The ingenious storyline of Save the Green Palnet where two characters obsessed with conspiracy theories kidnap the CEO of a prominent chemical company, believing him to be an alien intent on destroying the Earth, seems like a perfect canvas for your visionary direction, and I am eager to see how you will bring this intriguing plot to life.
Save the Green Planet – A Post New Wave Film
Save the Green Planet is a unique and at the same time quintessential film of the early 2000s in Korea. It is characteristic of the era in that it embodies the hallmarks of what I call the post-new wave of Korean cinema. Like their predecessors in the Korean new wave, these post-new wave films have social issues at the heart of their cinematic construction. Moving away from the conventional filmmaking of overly sentimental melodramas and action movies with formulaic fistfights that dominated the scene in the 1970s, both the Korean new wave and post-new wave films turn their critical cameras to issues affecting real people, such as class, poverty, and post-colonial national identity. However, unlike their antecedents, post-new wave directors consciously and clearly played with genres to structure their stories.
Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (2006) depicts a family whose livelihood depends on a tiny kiosk on the riverbank, which is also their home. The head of the family, Hee-bong, has grown-up children: two sons and a daughter. The first son is slow and has a teenage daughter, while the second son is jobless due to his political activism during his student years. The family faces a significant disaster when a 20-meter-long deformed alligator emerges from the Han River. This marks a striking difference from films with a tone of realism that typically explain the problems of the underclass and the downtrodden as being due to political and economic injustices. Instead of focusing on these systemic issues, The Host introduces a predatory monster that eats people, runs as fast as cars, and thinks smarter than humans.
The Comfort of Genre: Allegory in Save the Green Planet
This obvious resort to genre movies makes the film allegorical and gives the audience a safe space to look into reality. It is not quite the same as watching, for instance, Bad Movie (1997) by Jang Seon-woo, considered one of the Korean new wave films, where the life of teenagers on the streets is unfiltered and in your face to the point of being painful and embarrassing. Reality is there as if on a rippled water in an allegory to deliver esoteric message, but you know that it is not going to bite you.
Save the Green Planet pushes the play of genres to the limit while examining the case of a social outcast named Byung-ku. In this sense, it is a very peculiar post-new wave film. The main character has a rather unfortunate past. He lost his coal miner father in an accident. His mother is unconscious after an accident at the chemical factory where she worked. Byung-ku himself had rough teenage years in a school that believed in the cane instead of nurturing and ended up in a juvenile camp.
What Byung-ku goes through in his life seems to be a summary of what bad capitalism did to Korea. Yet the film explicitly incorporates sci-fi conventions into its storytelling. Byung-ku explains why the CEO he kidnapped is from Andromeda, using reasoning that is all too familiar from numerous sci-fi movies. This feels more than an incorporation of the genre. It is a mockery or a test of the genre to see how sci-fi films can relate to our real lives.
A Self-Reflexive Sci-Fi
What does this overt self-reflexive use of sci-fi lingo make Save the Green Planet? An allegory of Korean society that ignored the downside of half-voluntary and half-forced modernization? Maybe, or maybe not. The answer is not clear. But one thing is certain: it is the combination of two completely separate elements that makes the film unique and vibrant with pulsating energy to destroy and reimagine the core of who we are.
