‘Green Planet’ Blues
Jesse Plemons makes a case for him being Yorgos Lanthimos’s great muse in their second go-’round.
Bugonia
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos • Writer: Will Tracy, based on the screenplay by Jang Joon-hwan
Starring: Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis, Alicia Silverstone
Ireland / UK / Canada / South Korea / USA • 1hr 58mins
Opens Hong Kong October 30 • III
Grade: B
Did you see Jang Joon-hwan’s now cult classic Save the Green Planet!? It was a very early Korean Wave entry, about a possibly crazy dude who tips over the edge into homicidal mania after his mother dies. The dude was also a card carrying member of the tin foil hat club, aware in a way no one else in the world was of an alien existential threat to Earth. Luckily, the aliens in question are hiding in plain sight, one as the CEO of the chaebol that killed the dude’s mother. Back in 2003 Green Planet was a slyly political black comedy about unchecked corporate greed and environmental degradation that hinted at where Korean cinema was heading. And it was the OG conspiracy nut comedy for the modern era.
So for Yorgos Lanthimos to choose it for a 2025 spin as Bugonia isn’t a stretch; there was also an absurd quality to the Korean film that suits Lanthimos’s artistic sentiments. What is surprising is how he tones down the Lanthimos of it all in this relocated remake. Like most of his recent work, it’s not going to be for everyone (well, that’s actually all of his work), it trades in a baked-in high concept and it stars Emma Stone. The long and short of it: if you’re a Killing of a Sacred Deer and Poor Things Yorgosite Bugonia may not be your jam. It’s arguably his most accessible and “normal” film to date, so if you’ve been wondering what all the fuss was about, this could be entry level; it’s easy on both social commentary and ultra-stylisation. There’s nary a fisheye lens to be found. No matter who you are, it’s infinitely better than Kinds of Kindness.
I’ll get your leader myself
The always awesome Jesse Plemons takes over for Shin Ha-kyun as Teddy, a grungy, greasy order fulfilment worker in an Amazon-type factory run by the business wunderkind female Auxolith CEO Michelle Fuller (Stone) a pharmaceutical giant. He’s also a part-time beekeeper, because we know the world needs its bees, and after losing his mother (holy crap, Alicia Silverstone) to alien medical fuckery, he’s dead set on stopping the Andreomedans, as they’re called, from their global conquest and subjecting others to the same fate as his mom. The first step in this scheme? Kidnap the boss Andromedan on Earth, who just happens to be Fuller. Teddy ropes his slow but sweet cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) into his plan (he stands in for the orignal film’s jilted but loyal girlfriend Su-ni), which is largely torturing Fuller into confessing the Andromedan take-over with a series of gruesome homemade devices.
If you have seen Green Planet, you’ll know where Bugonia is going. It keeps the skeleton of that film and lets screenwriter Will Tracy (a writer for John Oliver, The Menu) reimagine the story in terms of geography, time and technology, and he does a pretty good job of making the changes work, the Girl Boss energy and the drudgery of e-commerce fulfilment centres first and foremost. Carrying over is our continuing ecological decay and the terrifying legitimisation of conspiratorial thinking. Why none of this has any real impact is a mystery for the ages. The gender swap in the CEO gains no traction, and saying little to nothing about conspiracists making a mess of real news and shredding decades of science – including climate science – is a missed golden opportunity. John Oliver does this every Sunday, so it’s weird to think Tracy couldn’t dredge up a few more jokes about the sorry state of the world.
None of Bugonia’s shortcomings can be laid at Plemons’s feet, once again proving he can steal a movie from almost anyone – Game Night, Killers of the Flower Moon, Jungle fucking Cruise – including his wife, which he did in Civil War in about five minutes. His shaggy, increasing desperation and snap from passivity to violence are on point; he somehow manages to make us root for him, made easier by general CEO-directed ire these days, but made harder for his manipulation of Don. Stone glowers and delivers 1% cruelty with aplomb but Tracy doesn’t make any attempts to play with the character. It’s Fuller who points out Teddy is in desperate need of mental healthcare, which is another thread that goes nowhere – in 2025 when there’s a better understanding of mental health and huge potential to add another layer to the story. Is Teddy right or ill? Of course, it’s a Lanthimos film so there are several moments of dark, laugh out loud humour, and it looks great, if not as distinctive as his past films do. Production designer James Price (Poor Things, Paddington 2) and Lanthimos and Ken Loach regular DOP Robbie Ryan both deliver visually, separating Teddy’s world from Fuller’s, and Teddy’s reality from everyone else’s. Bugonia isn’t a disaster, but it’s far from peak Lanthimos, and it’s endlessly ironic that a 20-year-old film says more about 2025 than a film from 2024 does.