With a title like Save the Green Planet!, audiences might expect a goofy, endearing pro-environmental comedy with an uplifting, optimistic message. Instead, first time director/writer Jun-hwan Jeong delivers a deliriously over-the-top (and ultraviolent), brilliantly original film that has less to do with violence toward the environment than with violence toward each other, regardless of the reasons. Jeong combines an alien conspiracy plot out of the X-Files, a demented, emotionally scarred, if sympathetic, protagonist, a kidnap plot, an unsympathetic corporate executive (who may or may not be an alien), a police procedural subplot (two detectives, one middle-aged, one beginning his career, both tracking the protagonist), and enough black comedy and socio-political subtext to make Save the Green Planet! a worthy addition to the recent wave of top-notch Korean imports (e.g., Old Boy, A Tale of Two Sisters, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, 3-Iron) on American and European shores.
Jun-hwan Jeong's assured direction is evident from the first scene, a slide show guided by the manic, panic-stricken voice of Byung-Gu (Shin Ha-Hyun), the neurotic, possibly psychotic protagonist. This first scene also serves to instantly identify the audience with the protagonist's solipsistic world. The subject of the slides, Kang Man-shik (Yun-shik Baek), a CEO of a chemical company, has been selected by Byung-Gu for kidnapping. Byung-Gu suspects Kang of being an alien from Andromeda, the leader of an alien conspiracy to exploit the earth's natural (and human) resources and ultimately, to destroy the planet.
Within minutes, Byung-Gu and his portly, part-time circus acrobat girlfriend Sooni (Jeong-min Hwang) have kidnapped a drunk, surly, and definitely uncooperative Kang from an underground garage and taken him back to Byung-Gu's mountainside retreat. There, Byung-Gu expects to wrest vital information about the alien conspiracy from Kang, who, mirroring his position on earth as a corporate executive, is also an alien leader. Byung-Gu's paranoid fantasies are, if anything, logically constructed, based on information gleaned from videos, books, and apparently, personal observations and experiences. According to Byung-Gu, Kang's uncanny resemblance to a human being isn't completely deceitful: Kang's species share genetic material with humans, with one telling exception: their central nervous systems and their endurance of pain.
Byung-Gu's explanation segues into the first of several (each worse than the last) torture scenes, with Byung-Gu and Sooni using Kang's vulnerability to antihistamines to pry an admission from Kang about his identity and his plans for the earth. Of course, Kang proves to be more resilient than Byung-Gu has anticipated. What begins as a conventional kidnap plot, with the kidnapper, his victim, and a weaker third party (i.e., Sooni doesn't completely share Byung-Gu's convictions) three sides of an unstable triangle, shifts almost immediately, as several new elements and characters are introduced, taking Save the Green Planet! into unpredictable territory.
Save the Green Planet! breaks away from Byung-Gu and Kang to introduce secondary, if important characters, the two detectives investigating Kang's disappearance. Inspector Chu (Jae-yong Lee), a disgraced, middle-aged detective, is warned off the case. A younger detective (apparently fresh out of the academy), Inspector Kim (Ju-hyeon Lee) offers his assistance to Chu, but is quickly rebuffed. The detectives are written as honorable if, in the case of the older detective, cynical men. First one detective, then the other, begins to follow the clues back to Byung-Gu. The two detectives, in fact, are the only unreservedly sympathetic characters in Save the Green Planet!. Both men eventually find their way to Byung-Gu's retreat, but with vastly different results. In the first encounter, Jun-hwan Jeong uses audience expectations (i.e., will the detective discover Byung-Gu's identity and save Kang, or will Byung-Gu act first?) into a tautly paced scene that owes something to a similar scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
As Save the Green Planet! veers back into the kidnapping plot, complete with mind games between Byung-Gu and Kang and several escape attempts, details emerge about Byung-Gu that makes him at least partially sympathetic. Jun-hwan Jeong's script reveals two types of information about Byung-Gu, his present and near-present actions (all reprehensible) and background details about his personal life, including a string of failures, all marred by violence, from both his peers and later, from authority figures (teachers, supervisors, police officers) that, at minimum, have contributed to his damaged state. Jun-hwan Jeong, however, isn't content with a reductive explanation of Byung-Gu's behavior (i.e., nurture in the nature vs. nurture debate), but instead opts, at least in the voice of another major character, for a natural explanation (e.g., a violence gene). The response to the first explanation, of course, allows for some optimism. The second explanation, however, allows for none. Jun-hwan Jeong, it seems, opts for an ambiguous answer.
Sadly, however, Jun-hwan Jeong takes a different approach in answering the central question posed in Save the Green Planet!: is Byung-Gu a dangerous, delusional psychotic with persecution mania and a messianic complex? Or are his theories about Kang and the alien conspiracy correct? As Save the Green Planet! unfolds, the answer appears clear at first, then grows into uncertainty and ambiguity. Instead, Jeong cheapens the overall emotional impact by taking an all-too-literal approach in an overlong denouement. Jeong overplays the humor when pathos would have been the better approach (for Jeong and the audience). Outside of the literal-minded denouement, however, it would be hard to argue with the proposition that Jun-hwan Jeong, in just his first feature film, has emerged as a director of the first rank.
© Mel Valentin, 12th May, 2005
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(9/10)
