‘Save the Green Planet’: The South Korean movie soon to be remade by Yorgos Lanthimos
The production company behind Parasite teaming with Ari Aster and Yorgos Lanthimos sounds like a mouth-watering match made in psychedelic, psychological, and existential heaven, instantly outlining Save the Green Planet as a project well worth keeping both eyes on.
Original director Jang Joon-hwan was initially announced to be helming the English-language remake of his own movie, with Aster producing alongside Hereditary and Midsommar‘s Lars Knudsen, and a script hailing from Succession and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver scribe Will Tracy.
However, the most recent developments confirmed that Joon-hwan was out, Lanthimos was in, and Save the Green Planet fits perfectly in his stylistic and thematic wheelhouse. A darkly comedic and wildly eccentric story rooted in science fiction, it hits many of the beats that have become the Poor Things filmmaker’s stock-in-trade.
Shin Ha-kyun’s Lee Byeong-gu becomes increasingly convinced that aliens from the distant planet of Andromeda have descended upon Earth and infiltrated human society. Earmarking Baek Yun-shik’s Kang Man-shik as the intergalactic army’s leader, he kidnaps the head of a chemical production company, retreats to his covert base of operations, and begins interrogating and torturing the alleged alien in the hopes that he’ll confess his true nature, and instruct his forces to abandon their plans for planetary destruction.
Matters are complicated further when Byeong’s girlfriend and a private detective begin circling, and the film’s inspirations are suitably outlandish. As Jang explained to The Village Voice, his inspirations hailed from an Academy Award-winning Stephen King adaptation and a far-fetched internet theory.
“I remember liking Misery a lot when it came out,” he said of Rob Reiner’s leg-breaking classic. “But it bothered me that she was just this crazy bitch. I knew that I wanted to make a film about kidnapping, but I also knew that I’d have to come at it from the opposite direction. I’d have to take the kidnapper’s point of view.”
Beyond that, Leonardo DiCaprio’s promiscuity was another important marker, leading the filmmaker to combine the two entirely unrelated sentiments into a single and entirely unique motion picture. “And when I came across this anti-DiCaprio website, claiming that he was an alien who was trying to seduce all the women on the planet in order to conquer Earth, the two ideas seemed to fit.”
Essentially, Save the Green Planet emerged from a combination of Kathy Bates’ Annie Wilkes being painted as a sympathetic figure, which was then combined with DiCaprio being an alien tasked to bed every woman on Earth, subsequently filtered through nightmare-fueller Aster and then picked up by Lanthimos. If that isn’t enough to get the pulse racing for fans of the latter’s distinctive filmography, then it’s hard to imagine anything that will.
