The First Bugonia: Save the Green Planet! (2003)

I just watched Save the Green Planet! (2003), the Korean film serving as the base movie for 2025's Bugonia. It's an interesting, unique remake case as initially the director of the former, Jang Joon-hwan, was signed on to direct the latter, before he ultimately left the project for health reasons. He was reportedly thrilled that Lanthimos got the gig in his place, but I do wonder what Jang Joon-hwan himself would've personally done with the American remake of his own movie.

While it is much the same film, the feel is very different. There are a number of changes and subtleties that make each version of the story feel vastly separate despite following broadly the same plot. Both convey a deep hopelessness and a sense of unstoppable injustice, but Save the Green Planet! has this often cartoonish sense of grief and rage and misery, and a bizarrely convoluted backstory for its protagonist that is hard to fully take in given that it comes to us in the form of a rapid, confusing flashback.

What I do find particularly interesting in the original film is the focus on police (and other authority) brutality. The kidnapped CEO bloke here (not a woman, btw, in this case) more directly represents the world's networks of authority. He, like the protagonist's father and teachers, who abuse him, and the police officers who viciously attack him and other protestors, has unstoppable, unfathomable power to hurt and/or kill people. Our protagonist blubbers through an indelicate and unclear plan of seemingly unfocused, explosive retribution for the suffering he's had to endure, and accomplishes nothing. The way that this version of the story approaches death, human extinction, and indifference to suffering feels less subtle and more gory, more ruthless, than Bugonia's. There's even a sequence where we watch real holocaust (and other atrocity) footage. A real 'humans suck' moment.

Of course, the 'humans suck' moment is there in Bugonia, but Emma's version of the big boss is so much more complicated, so much more attuned to the pain of her subjects. Where her lip quivers extinguishing and stilling human life on Earth, her Green Planet equivalent slams the big alien button that will eradicate the entire planet in a blaze, his steely glare unbroken. Where she is a foreign creature neither right or wrong, he is the pure undistilled essence of authority's total indifference.

I like both for different reasons, and although I would say I prefer Bugonia for its subtler approach, its grounded elements, and its exemplary performances overall, I love the sheer inventiveness and style of Save the Green Planet! There are so many beautifully designed and shot journal pages, saved photographs, annotated clippings, etc. There is so much incredible visual flair.

Jang Joon-hwan saw Misery, and wanted to see a more complicated, weirder Annie. He read about some crackpot theory online claiming Leonardo DiCaprio was an alien. And bam, he had his movie. And what a movie it is.

Four bloodied men out of five.

★★★★☆