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| Images courtesy of CJ Entertainment |
Films that address class struggle and the rallying cry of "Eat the rich!" have always resonated with audiences, and South Korea has been particularly outspoken in its critique of capitalism. While Bong Joon Ho’s acclaimed 2019 film Parasite brought this issue to the forefront of Western awareness, it has been a recurring theme in South Korean cinema for decades. One notable example is director Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet (2003), which examines the class divide through a mix of dark humor and truly harrowing torture and gore sequences.
Byeong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun) is a man on a mission: to root out and destroy alien invaders from Andromeda PK 45 who are planning to take over the earth. His next target is pharmaceutical executive Kang Man-shik (Baek Yoon-sik), whom he believes is a high-ranking alien commander who can contact his superiors off-planet. Byeong-gu and his naive girlfriend, Su-ni (Hwang Jeong-min), kidnap Kang and imprison him in a basement full of tools and chemicals, which they use to conduct tests that will “prove” that Kang is an alien.
Like many Korean films, the tone goes constantly between two different extremes; at first it seems like the story is going to be a wacky comedy about a mentally unstable man with a chip on his shoulder about corporations, but it quickly shifts gears to psychological body horror as he subjects Kang to horrible punishments like getting his skin rubbed raw with abrasive towels, then putting burning antiseptic on the wounds and eventually even breaking one of his legs. If this seems reminiscent of Misery (1990), that's intentional. In an interview, Jang revealed he was partially inspired by the film adapted from the Stephen King novel:
“I remember liking Misery a lot when it came out, but it bothered me that [the Kathy Bates character] 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.” [1]
Byeong-gu has had a hard life full of disappointment, abused by his father and other authority figures in his life, and once he got out on his own, he was crushed under the ever-turning gears of capitalism. Kang’s pharmaceutical company poisoned his mother during an experimental drug trial and put her into a coma that she never recovered from. Every facet of Byeong-gu’s deranged persona has been handcrafted by late-stage capitalism screwing over the lower class and giving them no recourse or justice.
Jang’s film is nuanced enough to portray Byeong-gu as a flawed person himself, as he wavers between thinking his actions are justified and noble and just taking pleasure in hurting another human. His insistence that Kang is an alien is just a coping mechanism to dehumanize him so that he doesn’t feel bad about torturing him, but anytime his cognitive dissonance is challenged, he shuts down.
It makes for a compelling character study and has a lot of resonance even today in a world where a CEO is murdered on the streets and the killer is celebrated. While that sounds ghoulish in a vacuum, one must wonder what would drive someone to take such an action, and why the general public does not feel as sympathetic as they should. Save the Green Planet attempts to explore these uncomfortable questions head-on.
[1] https://www.villagevoice.com/leo-dicaprio-alien-seductor-so-says-director-jang-jun-hwan/
--Michelle Kisner