Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Writer: Will Tracy, based on Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan
Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone

You may or may not have heard of/seen a little 2003 South Korean film called Save the Green Planet!, and if you have not, you are severely missing out. It is one of my favourite films, a five-star triumph by Jang Joon-hwan. Granted I haven’t watched it in a few years (I no longer have the DVD and can’t find it on streaming with English subtitles – sadly my Korean is not good enough), but I do remember what absolute fun and how well-made it was. Jang was slated to make an English (American) remake, however he apparently took ill and could not helm it, and so he bestowed the project on Yorgos Lanthimos – a very fine choice, in my opinion, as his outlandish imagination and ability to inject fun into his films isn’t too dissimilar to what the project would entail. To that end, has Lanthimos done right by Jang and his original film, or could this be considered a failed replica?

Alien conspiracist Teddy (Plemons) and his intellectually challenged cousin Don (Delbis) kidnap Michelle Fuller (Stone), the hugely famous CEO of a pharmaceutical corporation, due to Teddy’s belief that she is an alien in disguise. Teddy wants to use to her to negotiate with the Andromedans, her species, to get them to stop trying to enslave humans and, for some reason, killing the bees. Michelle tries to convince them that she’s not an alien, and in turn attempts to bargain with Teddy by telling him she can help his mother (Silverstone), who lies in a coma in hospital after taking part in the testing of an experimental drug from Michelle’s own company and which the company has tried to cover up. However, everything doesn’t go entirely according to plan, for neither Teddy nor Michelle.

If you’re familiar with Lanthimos’s films, you’ll know that they are often dark in comedy and strange in story but rich in meaning and emotion – at least, those are often my take-aways. Thus, he absolutely was the perfect fit to take on this film and give it his own flair while retaining all that made Save the Green Planet! a terrific all-rounder. The story is much the same, so Will Tracy did a great job adapting it (with producer and another tremendous filmmaker Ari Aster giving Tracy the project), though the characters differ somewhat and there is a little less cohesion when it comes to some of the relationships. It also isn’t quite as substantially thematic as some of Lanthimos’s other films, nor as deep, much like the original film, but sometimes we don’t want to go trawling for meaning – having it glaring us in the face (in this case the existence of humans and how precarious life and the way we treat the Earth really is) is necessary to let other aspects shine through, in this case the performances and story, which is entertaining enough, though it does utilise some symbolism regarding the state of the planet and other things that shall not be named in order to avoid spoilers – you’ll just have to look out for them!

Visually, it’s just as wonderful as we’d expect from Lanthimos. His directorial eye worked well in tandem with cinematographer and frequent collaborator Robbie Ryan (shooting the film on 35mm with VistaVision cameras, which is iconic and has already made quite the comeback in The Brutalist and One Battle After Another recently), and the art design makes for a lot of eye-catching scenery and set dressing. It’s interesting to note that Lanthimos apparently did not allow composer and other frequent collaborator Jerskin Fendrix to see a script or any of the film before putting a score to it but instead gave him four words to go off of: bees, basement, spaceship and Emily-bald. Knowing this before seeing the film would have made much of the jarring music make more sense, however the unsettling feeling that comes with the at-times-blaring orchestra actually works well to give a sense of something not being right. Throw in some more popular tracks (Green Day’s Basket Case and Chappell Roan’s Good Luck, Babe!) and the music side of the film is an odd mix that, somehow, works.

Speaking of frequent collaborators, Lanthimos brings back Emma Stone (The Favourite, Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness) and Jesse Plemons (Kinds of Kindess) to lead the film. We’re generally used to Stone playing more empathetic and relatable characters, or at least characters we in turn can empathise with, but here we have her as a rather unscrupulous CEO that oddly tries to placate her employees by allowing them to ‘leave early if they need to, unless there’s work to be done, but if not, feel free to leave’. It’s a fresh role that allows her to widen her range and demonstrate her versatility, which she does with great aplomb. In comparison to his Save the Green Planet! counterpart character, named Byeong-gu, Plemons’s Teddy is much less bonkers but no less utterly convinced of the aliens that have targeted Earth. The sincerity with which Plemons plays the character, particularly when it comes to his relationships, is quite beautiful, though it does mean that the comedy that came with Byeong-gu is mostly lost. To go someway to making up for that, Teddy’s relationship with Don is really sweet, even though Teddy seems to have roped Don into his criminal activity without Don being fully aware of the ramifications. Don is played wonderfully by newcomer Aidan Delbis, with Don’s softer nature juxtaposing well against the tougher and more stubborn Teddy. He does in fact steal some scenes from Plemons, and even Stone at times, which he is to be applauded for, and although we want to be on Teddy’s side if there are truly aliens, it is Delbis’s performance that emotionally pulls us in to Teddy’s world, because although Don may be intellectually disabled, he has a much stronger moral compass than his cousin.

Though this film may not be quite as good as some of Lanthimos’s others, nor the original film, he did a stand-up job of taking on Jang’s story and bringing it to a wider (English) audience. It’s entertaining and hilarious but may also leave you with a little bit of an existential crisis at the end. If Emma Stone’s commitment to going bald for this film isn’t enough to make you go and see it, then perhaps this review can convince you that it is indeed worth your time, the ending in particular is worth sticking around for. As I often say when I sign off on reviews of Lanthimos films, I truly cannot wait to see what he does next.