Save the Green Planet Jun-hwan Jeong South Korea 2003
As the key influences of Save the Green Planet waver before your eyes you might grasp the main thread, a stir-fried version of Misery with considerably more back-story and lots of Bees. Lee kidnaps his former boss and industrialist Kang in the belief that he is an alien from Andromeda. Kang is tortured to glean information on a suspected alien plot towards the Green Planet (that would be Earth) to be carried out during the imminent Lunar eclipse despite Kang’s protestations of innocence. As the Police close in we learn secrets about both men.
Barely able to hold genre, Save the Green Planet is a carousel of influences fastened to a horrifically over-sentimental frame. As the action goes haywire, one scene alone links the monolith from 2001 to Noah’s Ark to Atlantis and more. Hardcore violence abounds (why else would there be Bees?) but is spiked by the kind of sluggish emotional slush that many Eastern exports sneak (notably The Eye and Inner Senses recently) to cynical Western audiences, who prefer Dark Water to Days of our Lives. Lead torturer Lee has a sympathetic history summarised by motifs of cocktail umbrellas, his overweight tightrope walking girlfriend and the constant snatches of ‘Over the Rainbow’. Then again, attempts to steam clean suspected aliens’ bowels erode these kinds of sentiments.
Reacting in a manner counter-intuitive to standard narrative resolution gives us both possible endings: A kind of schizophrenic smorgasbord of a story. Flirting outrageously with the ‘Is he / Isn’t he an alien’ convention for most of the film, director Jun-hwan Jeong almost visibly shrugs, flips the switch and spurts the goodies out in a blast of information. Roundabout here the film goes plain insane, laughing at more regular attempts to present mystery through an open-ended approach. Anyone used to the frugal nineties approach to intrigue and science fiction (exemplified by Twin Peaks and the X Files) mystery is soon going to be dizzy with illicit information.
Bi-polar cinema is normally associated with sleazy derivative pap or the proliferation of video cameras on secure hospital wards. By applying an awesomely sublime solution to the standard double guessing scenario, theatres showing Save the Green Planet should really charge you twice. Once, as you’d expect and twice, for the vicious co-joined doppelganger of a movie that attacks you unexpectedly.
