The long-anticipated remake of Save the Green Planet (2003), Bugonia, has finally been unveiled to audiences. Early reviews vary widely—from comparisons to Ari Aster’s COVID-era western Eddington (2025) to reluctant praise calling it the most accessible film yet from Lanthimos, a director known for crafting beautifully captivating yet deliberately puzzling imagery. Only a year earlier, he sharply divided viewers with Poor Things (2024), a gender-politics-inflected steampunk fable in which a dead woman is reborn with her unborn baby’s brain. However macabre its premise, the film catalyzed ongoing debates about the ownership and construction of femininity, underscoring its contemporary relevance.

As a remake of a film now more than two decades old, how does Bugonia hold its relevance for filmgoers in 2025?

The narrative of Save the Green Planet (2003) centers on Byung-ku, a young man marked by a succession of personal and structural catastrophes. His father is killed in a coal-mine accident, while his mother remains in a coma, likely caused by prolonged exposure to toxic chemicals at the factory where she worked. Byung-ku himself endures a series of compounded misfortunes: corporal punishment administered by a prejudiced high-school teacher who targets students from impoverished backgrounds, followed by institutionalization in a juvenile detention center after he mistakenly stabs one of his bullies.

These experiences crystallize into a macabre conviction. Byung-ku comes to believe that the CEO of the chemical company responsible for his family’s suffering is an alien from Andromeda, sent to destroy the Earth. In an attempt to “save the green planet,” he kidnaps and imprisons the CEO in his basement, pressing him to intervene in the Andromedan prince’s impending decision. The deadline for this desperate negotiation is a total lunar eclipse only days away.

What emerges is an encounter between the wildly implausible and the brutally real: a science-fiction allegory that stages the underside of South Korea’s rapid economic growth, punctuated by man-made disasters disproportionately borne by the powerless and underprivileged. Through the speculative lens of science fiction—more precisely, through the fractured imagination of its protagonist—the film reframes Korea’s recent traumatic past. Yet the question remains: does it fully succeed? While the film carries a strong current of social satire, lampooning merciless capitalists as inhuman, calculating aliens devoid of compassion, it ultimately stops short of sustained engagement with the structural realities of poverty and class inequality, opting instead for comedic excess over deeper excavation.

Greek Weird Wave

Surprisingly, Yorgos Lanthimos, the director of Bugonia, retains many of the core plot premises from Save the Green Planet in his remake. He even preserves the motif of antihistamines as a means of neutralizing alien power: in Bugonia, Teddy asks Michelle to apply an allergy cream whose active ingredient is an antihistamine, echoing Byung-ku’s use of a liquid painkiller containing chlorpheniramine maleate in the original film.

Several significant changes, however, recalibrate the story’s social and thematic coordinates. The CEO of a chemical factory becomes Michelle Fuller, the head of a pharmaceutical corporation and one of the most prominent female entrepreneurs of her generation. Byung-ku is reimagined as Teddy, a factory worker and beekeeper, memorably played by Jesse Plemons, who lends emotional density to a character shaped by familial trauma. This alteration—particularly Teddy’s occupation as a beekeeper—subtly shifts the grounds of his paranoia. The fear of extraterrestrial annihilation is now entangled with environmental anxiety, registering a move toward ecological consciousness.

Teddy’s psychological disarray can be traced to his mother’s illness, likely caused by prolonged exposure to toxic substances produced by Michelle’s company. Yet his concern extends beyond personal grievance to the disappearance of bees, a crisis that resonates with broader warnings about ecological collapse. As nature’s primary pollinators, bees become an index of systemic vulnerability, suggesting that environmental catastrophe may precede, rather than follow, human extinction. In foregrounding environmental consciousness alongside the unchecked advancement of pharmaceutical technologies—often at the expense of human rights—the film raises a pressing question: does Bugonia succeed in renewing its relevance for audiences in 2025?

A Lanthimos film, however, rarely functions as straightforward social commentary. After all, he was a central figure in what The Guardian’s Steve Rose famously termed the “Greek Weird Wave,” a movement that emerged in the late 2000s and reshaped contemporary Greek cinema. Across Lanthimos’s filmography, the absurd and the unsettling are not stylistic flourishes but structural principles.

In Dogtooth (2009), three children are confined to their home, rigorously insulated from the outside world and fed fabricated knowledge—yellow flowers, for instance, are described as zombies. The Lobster (2015) imagines a society in which single individuals are compelled to check into a hotel and secure a romantic partner within forty-five days or face transformation into an animal. In one telling scene, a man filling out a form at the reception desk must declare himself either heterosexual or homosexual; when he asks about bisexuality, the receptionist tersely replies that it is no longer permitted under the new rules, offering no further explanation.

Similarly, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) follows a surgeon who befriends a teenage boy convinced that the doctor bears responsibility for his mother’s death. The boy issues an impossible ultimatum: unless the doctor chooses one member of his own family as a sacrificial scapegoat, his wife and children will succumb to a debilitating illness. In Lanthimos’s cinematic universe, reality operates according to opaque, irrational logics that resist moral clarity or psychological coherence. By comparison, Bugonia presents a far more legible narrative: the story of a psychologically fractured man who externalizes his paranoia by fixing it onto a single, identifiable figure.

From Excess to Measure: Reframing Save the Green Planet

Emma Stone’s Michelle and Jesse Plemons’s Teddy engage in a charged exchange of accusations about the impending destruction of the world—teetering on the edge of conspiracy theory yet delivered with unwavering conviction. Their dialogue is marked by tactical shifts, moving from outright denial to calculated complicity. Michelle initially rejects Teddy’s claim that she is an alien tasked with determining whether humanity deserves a second chance. Gradually, however, she adapts her strategy, choosing to play along with his delusion. She even suggests that she possesses a cure for Teddy’s ailing mother: a bottle of blue liquid kept in her car, labeled “antifreeze.” Whose story should be trusted?

As their interaction unfolds, the nature of their relationship slides from that of innocent victim and captor to a far more ambiguous dynamic—one of manipulation and psychological vulnerability. This inversion is visually echoed in an atemporal black-and-white flashback in which Teddy holds a bundle of hospital tubes, at the end of which his mother appears to float. The image recalls a child gripping his precious balloon at the end of the long lines, which might fly away and be lost. In this sense, Lanthimos’s Bugonia emerges as a persuasive parable of personal tragedy—one rendered nearly invisible beneath the juggernaut of technological development and industrial progress.

Save the Green Planet is willfully chaotic and heretical, fusing harsh social critique with science-fiction imagination. The film draws its energy from this centrifugal mix of genres and narrative registers, generating insights into South Korea’s recent history through excess rather than coherence. Even when its collision of incompatible social commentaries with alien conspiracies and doomsday fantasies veers toward comedy, it retains a ring of truth. In its uneven rush toward modernity, Korea’s transformation was not without farcical elements—moments in which national progress masks personal and familial tragedies. Bugonia, by contrast, operates as a far more measured and calculated allegory of a question of justice in contemporary society, as well as of the difficulty of locating truth in an era defined by competing and coexisting versions of reality. While it revisits the same narrative premise, it ultimately tells a different story for a different world.