When the director of the modern weird, Yorgos Lanthimos, teamed up with frequent collaborator and muse Emma Stone on their wild, conspiratorial environmental-extraterrestrial film, Bugonia, they drew inspiration from a little-known source: a 2003 Korean film called Save the Green Planet. If you walked away from Lanthimos’ deliciously odd and of-the-moment movie, wondering if it could’ve stood to be even more bizarre, its progenitor is definitely worth checking out.
Directed by Jang Joon-hwan, Save the Green Planet’s premise, which writer Will Tracy adapted for Bugonia, closely informs its Western remake. That said, unlike Bugonia, which lets you coast in cold on the promise that Lanthimos and Stone are cooking up another slow-burn oddity, Save the Green Planet doesn’t wait to get weird. It does it from frame one.
It frontloads its madness, declaring its brand of environmentalism to be less Greta Thunberg and more Giorgio Tsoukalos, driven by a dead-serious belief in ancient aliens from Andromeda. It centers on Lee Byeong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun), a young man who abducts Kang Man-shik (Baek Yoon-sik), a top Korean executive, believing he’s part of an insidious alien reptilian invasion trying to take over Earth while operating under the guise of the pharmaceutical industry.
Like any fringe conspiracy theory, the story soon escalates; Byeong-gu conducts grueling experiments on Man-shik in his secluded basement torture chamber/film studio and tries to extract a confession out of the exec.
Given Bugonia’s conceit as a remake of Save the Green Planet, it almost goes without saying that there are small, apparent differences between the two films. Instead of Bugonia‘s bumbling pseudo-manipulative brother duo of the redpilled Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and bright-eyed and loyal-to-a-fault Don (Aidan Delbis), who threaten to force the truth out of Stone’s Amazon-esque executive Michelle Fuller, Byeong-gu works hand-in-hand with his girlfriend, the charming, spacey Su-ni (Hwang Jeong-min). They’re unified in their effort to extract a confession from Man-shik, whom they believe is intergalactic royalty, by any means necessary.
© CJ EntertainmentOther notable differences include the fact that Bugonia‘s scene-stealing cop, Stavros Halkias’ Casey, is mainly there for Nathan Fielder-coded awkward conversational laughs, while Save the Green Planet has a more developed B-plot with seasoned Detective Choo (Lee Jae-yong) and green Detective Kim (Lee Joo-hyun) as they track Byeong-gu and piece together the deep-seated psychological motivations behind his fringe machinations.
Lanthimos’ Bugonia is delightfully chaotic, dry-humored, and utterly captivating—especially with wide shots letting Plemons and Stone chew the scenery—but it left me with the nagging feeling that it could’ve been even weirder on the whole. It was plenty bizarre from start to finish, with an almost blank check assurance that whether Teddy’s conspiracy proved true or false, an explosively entertaining climax was guaranteed. Still, it elicited more reactionary “aha!” laughs rather than “oh wtf” mouth-agape smirks and raised-eyebrow gawking at the weirdness it committed to celluloid. Save the Green Planet delivers that exact brand of strangeness in excess.
© CJ EntertainmentDespite its wild tone, whipping between intense Korean dramas like Kim Jee-won’s I Saw the Devil and the darkly comedic yet ultra-violent style of Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer, Jang keeps his conspiratorial, manic thriller dream afloat without seeming tonally dissonant. If anything, the film reveals layers like an infinite matryoshka doll, with more spectacle and suspense to show in spades, in tandem with its gruesome, Saw-like traps. The director’s erratic, experimental, and expressive handheld camerawork and naturalistic framing create a kind of visual synesthesia—blurring mood and meaning to create some of the wildest swings between slapstick absurdity and gut-punch drama ever committed to celluloid.
© CJ EntertainmentOne of my favorite scenes is Byeong-gu’s full-blown Telltale Heart spiral, where he scrambles to hide the still-breathing evidence of his botched abduction. The undercover inspector drops by for a casual drink and chat about aliens, unknowingly leaning against the very CCTV broadcasting Man-shik—crucified in the basement dungeon, clear as day. Meanwhile, Man-shik’s hand creeps out from a hidden latch, clawing desperately at the inspector’s boot, only for Byeong-gu to stomp it down mid-sentence, all while trying to pass as a normal guy who isn’t sweating bullets at all over his destiny as humanity’s savior, having his DIY makeshift toilet Andromedan torture device unearthed.
Interwoven with this comedy of errors, Su-ni’s on some random bullshit, dressing up her Barbie doll while monitoring Man-shik, or walking a tightrope between his torture sessions and bathroom breaks. Either that or you’re witnessing Byeong-gu’s delusions—daydreaming himself as a kung fu hero with all the wire-performing skill of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as he pirouettes through the air and high-kicks his meth dealer. The film plays like a lucid acid trip where dreams and reality, revelation and hallucination, teeter with each subsequent scene. All the while, the film refuses to reveal which is which.
Save the Green Planet feels less cynical than its 2025 remake and also more sincere, even as it oscillates between overt goofiness and oppressively serious tones. Bugonia plays like a prescient black comedy that both sides its way through modern paranoia—laughing equally at the 4Chan-adjacent, QAnon-flavored conspiracists and the woke-pandering corporate execs who speak in syrupy platitudes about inclusivity while quietly wringing every last drop of labor from their workers before clock-out (making sure never to explicitly call it overtime). The satire lands easier on the fringe weirdos, who’ve long been the internet’s favorite punching bag, while the executive class gets the safer treatment: flanderized, ironic, and meta-commentary-lite.
Lanthimos’ version lets the shoe drop either way, leaving you satisfied whether the corporation is alien or not. You even feel a flicker of sympathy for Stone’s Michelle Fuller—her emotionally violent corpo-speak is so gently antagonistic it feels more like a parody of culture than a critique of character. For American audiences, Bugonia is a laugh at the corrosive ideological split of Teddy: the radical environmentalist who lost the forest for the trees to the echo-chambered conspiracist who, perhaps, never saw the forest to begin with.
Save the Green Planet, by contrast, doesn’t just gesture at corporate evil—it goes all-in on it. Despite Byeong-gui’s absurdity, you can’t help but root for him. Teddy’s chaotic misadventures, meanwhile, feel more like a car crash waiting to happen, keeping you on the edge of your seat to see how much worse his misadventurous situation can get.
Western remakes often carry the burden of standing on the shoulders of giants, especially amid the steady outpouring of adaptations from Asian cinema. As Quentin Tarantino once riffed, “Great artists steal. They don’t do homages,” noting that he steals from every single movie ever made. The same argument can be made for Western remakes, which Bugonia now joins in the ranks of with frequent homage-payer Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest—a skinnier example of a remake that, despite Denzel Washington’s star power, can’t quite go toe-to-toe with Akira Kurosawa’s original. Some remakes simply don’t have arms long enough to box in the same weight class as the source.
Pointing this out isn’t a dig at Bugonia or other remakes—it’s to trace how directors like Lee and Lanthimos zero in on a single thread of the original and amplify it to fit their own cinematic musings, whether it’s AI dread in the arts, conspiracy spirals, or the slow rot of corporate doublespeak to iron them over.
These films stand shoulder to shoulder with other 2025 anxiety-laden time capsules like Ari Aster’s Eddington and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another—works steeped in the paranoia of being terminally online, politically scrambled, and spiritually exhausted. Jang did the same with Save the Green Planet, but louder and weirder, for 2003’s anxieties and his own ethos. And he did so by stealing explicitly.
Jang mines the internet for wild celebrity sex-alien rumors and spoofs 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s apes and obelisk. More pointedly, he flips Misery‘s dynamic, asking what his chimera of a story might look like from the abductor’s point of view. It’s less plot theft and more joy theft, if there ever was a term. A kind of genre larceny that Lanthimos channels too, less brazenly but just as intentionally in Bugonia. It’s a quality that makes both films different enough to walk away with entirely different takeaways despite, ultimately, being the same story.
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