Just a few short weeks back, Brandon and I covered the 2003 Korean sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! on the podcast, mostly because of our interest in the then-upcoming remake directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Bugonia. At the conclusion of our discussion, I remarked that I was curious to see what Lanthimos would change for his version, and whether he would keep the film’s epilogue twist as it was in the earlier film, forgo it altogether, or tweak it in some small way. Ultimately, if you have seen Save the Green Planet!, then you’re not going to be surprised by the roads that Bugonia takes, but if you’re like me, you’re still going to enjoy the ride quite a bit.
Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is a high profile female pharmaceutical executive that we first meet as she introduces “a new era” at work, one in which an “incident” (which remains unelaborated upon but about which we can make certain assumptions) has led to a “friendlier” face for the company. What this boils down to, mostly, is that she wants it made explicit to the workers in the office that they should take it for granted that they are allowed to go home at the end of their work day … as long as quotas are met, and people should obviously stay at the office if they have work to do. It’s typical corporate double speak, where a corporation wants to harvest the positive associations that come with a “kinder, gentler” approach to work-life balance in the wake of a public relations backlash, but still expects business to proceed as usual with no real change. It’s not a particularly flattering portrait, but it’s a familiar one. Outside of work, she has an extensive (and expensive) “reverse aging” routine that includes supplements, red-light masks, and extensive martial arts self defense training.
Teddy (Jesse Plemmons) works for Michelle’s company, Auxolith, packing boxes. He’s so far down the ladder that his team—which includes a woman who’s continuing to work despite injuring her hand and is clearly too aware of how easy it is to get rid of a squeaky wheel who might file a comp claim—doesn’t warrant even the most perfunctory of pep talks about quotas and staying late. Following a diagnosis that has rendered his mother (Alicia Silverstone) comatose, he has fallen down a rabbit hole of online conspiracy theories that have led him to one conclusion: aliens from Andromeda have infiltrated human organizations with the intent of enslaving the human race, and his boss is one of them. To this end, he enlists the help of his intellectually-disabled cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) in abducting Michelle when she arrives home from work one day. From there, he locks her in the basement, shaves her head so that she can’t use her hair to contact her mothership, and proceeds to demand that she prepare a message to tell her fellow Andromedans to expect Teddy’s arrival as advocate for the human race against their invasion. Michelle, naturally, has no idea what he’s talking about. Or does she?
If you’ve seen Save the Green Planet!, or even just saw the trailer, most of this is familiar to you. Teddy and his Korean counterpart, Lee Byeong-gu, even share the same backstory that their characters’ mothers are both hospitalized long term, and they share beekeeping as a hobby, with colony collapse disorder forming an integral part of both men’s alien-invasion hypotheses. The differences are pretty minor. Byeong-gu’s girlfriend in Planet! is replaced here by Teddy’s cousin; the plot point in which the captive CEO convinces the former to leave Byeong-gu by claiming that he doesn’t truly love her is replaced by a scene in which Michelle tells Don that the imminent arrival of the police puts him in serious danger. The biggest narrative change is probably the total excision of Planet!‘s subplot about two police officers, one an experienced but disgraced renegade and the other a young fast-tracked hot shot who circumvents his chain of command to consult the outsider. Although there is a police officer in this film, he’s unlike either of the two detectives, as he’s instead a socially awkward local police officer who is implied to have molested Teddy when he was the younger man’s teenage babysitter. If you’ve seen Planet!, you’ll likely recall that the two detectives therein had little bearing on the narrative and seemed to simply exist in order to give the film somewhere else to check in every once in a while and break up the monotony of spending the entire film solely in Byeong-gu’s basement. Here, those opportunities to give the audience a break come largely in the form of Teddy’s flashbacks to the time when his mother’s illness first began to affect her and his time having to still go into work while having his missing boss locked up in the basement, covered in antihistamine lotion (to numb her—or rather “its”—psychic powers). It’s a small difference, but by always keeping us in the same room as one of the two opposing forces at the movie’s core Lanthimos manages to ensure that the tension is always rising.
Of course, the most interesting and notable difference here is that the kidnapped executive in Planet! was a man named Kang Man-shik, while Bugonia has Stone playing a girlboss CEO, and that one small change has a big impact. Because of the difference in the optics and the gendered dynamics alone, watching Byeong-gu and his short girlfriend abduct Kang is a very different experience from watching two burly men attack Emma Stone, one of America’s Sweethearts. The fact that we see her practicing for just such a possibility as one of her first defining character traits reminds us of the bleak truth that there’s no amount of power, wealth, or status that a woman can amass to guarantee her protection from a very determined crazy man, and even as a member of the executive class she’s still prepared for the possibility that she’ll have to fight for her life just like more conventionally vulnerable women. Stone plays Michelle with a quiet strength and dignity that she only allows to slip when she’s alone, and it’s a performance that’s so potent and visceral that it’s easy to forget that—regardless of the seemingly batshit nonsense Teddy picked up on the internet—she is nonetheless a banal force of evil, a stakeholder in the enforcement of a power structure that Teddy (and we) have every right to resent and pray for the downfall of. There’s no need to go overcomplicating it with aliens (or any other brain-rotted conspiracies); Auxolith made Teddy’s mother sick and faced no consequences, and that’s enough to make him hate Michelle, with all the rest of it being a hat on a hat. Still, in seeing a woman chained to a mattress in the basement of a man with demonstrable tendency to fly into a rage, we can’t help but sympathize with her, more than we ever did with Kang.
There are a lot of little ideas and concepts to find within this text and pick over. I find it fascinating that Teddy ultimately does the same thing that Auxolith does with regards to reckless human testing, as he chemically castrated himself prior to the movie’s events and gives his unfortunate cousin the same injection prior to their taking of Michelle. Later in the film, Don tries to explain to Teddy that he’s having side effects from the drug, possibly even a sudden onset of chemical depression, which ultimately has tragic consequences. His kidnapping of Michelle in and of itself is an abduction of the kind that he believes aliens are guilty of. Like a lot of people who fall into these traps of conspiracies that engineer a more comprehensible world out of unconnected events, Teddy is a hypocrite, and that makes him and Michelle the same. And then, of course, there’s that ending. As one would probably expect from a remake helmed by Lanthimos, this is not merely a reheated dish, but a fresh take, even if you already know what all of the ingredients are.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Swampflix 