Save the Green Planet! (Korean: 지구를 지켜라!) (2003) Directed by Jang Joon-hwan. Written by Jang Joon-hwan. Starring Shin Ha-kyun and Baek Yoon-sik.
While reading about this movie, I should have kept count of all different ways film critics found to say, “What the fuck did I just watch?”
I can’t read Korean, so I’m relying on English-language reactions from mostly Western critics. I don’t know in detail what the reaction to the film was in Korea, but I think it was pretty positive. Writer and director Jang Joon-hwan and the lead actors won a handful of awards, so clearly the film made an impression upon its release, before settling into its current cult film status. I also haven’t been able to find much info about the production of the film, as in English-language spaces it generally shows up in lists or reviews of off-beat, low-profile sci fi films. That might change in the next year, as there is a much higher-profile English-language remake in the works, helmed by director Yorgos Lanthimos.
We’ll see how that goes. I hope it will at least get more eyes on this quirky, violent little gem of a film.
And, seriously, it’s a good question: What the fuck did I just watch?
And why is it so great?
According to Jang Joon-hwan, he got the idea for Save the Green Planet! when he thought of what Stephen King’s Misery would look like told from Annie Wilkes’ point of view, then he combined that with an idea drawn from a joke conspiracy website claiming that Leonardo DiCaprio is an alien from outer space. It’s a delightfully random idea origin story, and there is no real reason for it result in a good movie.
But it does. To paraphrase an AV Club film critic, a premise like this almost always ends up in a disappointing “not as cool as it sounds” area, but Save the Green Planet! does the opposite. This film is so much better than it has any right to be. It wholeheartedly commits to the bit, borrowing genre and media influences from every conceivable inspiration to create a patchwork of bleak, uncomfortable, off-the-wall weirdness. The style has a very early-2000s feel to it, with cinematic inspiration drawn from that kind of wry, bloody freneticism that we associate with the likes of Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez, but Jang and cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo make it work without feeling overly derivative or dated. Hong has an extremely impressive list of cinematography credits, including Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) and Parasite (2019).
And of course, it helps that the acting is fantastic, especially from leads Shin Ha-kyun and Baek Yoon-sik, and the scene-setting is both outrageous and creepy. Because, let’s be honest, if you have a chance to set a film in a conspiracy theorist’s torture dungeon hidden away in bunker alongside a rural beekeeper’s handmade mannequin workshop, why wouldn’t you?
The point is, the premise of Save the Green Planet! is completely nuts. The movie itself is completely nuts. It was Jang’s first feature film; it could so easily have been an embarrassing disaster. But there is a whole lot of skill, boldness, and cleverness in this movie, and the result is something unique, unsettling, and wholly entertaining.
A note about spoilers: This movie came out in 2003. You all know by now that these Sci Fi Film Club articles will spoil anything and everything about the movies. But I’m dropping a spoiler warning here anyway, because this is a cult film that isn’t widely available or well-known, even in sci fi film corners. And I am going to spoil the entire story, including the ending, which will almost certainly change the way you view the movie if you don’t know anything about it.
If you plan to watch it unspoiled, this is your chance to back out. Go into it blind. Report back.
Got it?
Let’s go.
Save the Green Planet! tells the story of Lee Byeong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun, absolutely brilliant in the role), a mentally ill, methamphetamine-addicted, part-time beekeeper who believes that malevolent aliens from outer space have infiltrated Earth, posing as people in positions of power. With the help of his girlfriend, Su-ni (Hwang Jeong-min), Byeong-gu abducts Kang Man-shik (Baek Yoon-sik, also fantastic), the CEO of a large chemicals and pharmaceuticals company, whom he believes to be one of these alien imposters. His goal is to disrupt the aliens’ takeover plan and save the Earth.
That’s all explained in the first few minutes of the movie. There is no build-up, no easing in, no establishment of a more familiar status quo. The film opens, and we are dropped headfirst into the world of Byeong-gu’s conspiracy-riddled paranoia. We have no idea how he got there.
(Aside: In 2002, Shin Ha-kyun played another desperate kidnapper in Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. But in my totally biased opinion, his best acting as a traumatized oddball character is in the 2021 show Beyond Evil, a brilliant Korean crime drama that is one of my favorite TV shows of all time. Perhaps I should make a note to myself to find an excuse to write about it in its own essay.)
A lot of articles and websites classify Save the Green Planet! as a comedy. They’re not wrong, really, as it is often very funny. But more truthfully, this is the kind of movie destined to frustrate people who desire precise genre classifications. It is, by design, all over the place, swinging wildly from absurd to horrifying to tense to sincere in a matter of seconds. It’s a riotous blend of genres and genre conventions: brutal crime drama, revenge thriller, absurdist surrealism, torture porn horror, slapstick comedy, and, yes, a bit of political sci fi. The only song of the soundtrack is numerous different versions of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” A man dies by getting attacked by bees and stumbling off a cliff. The main character’s girlfriend is a circus tightrope walker who practices in a torture dungeon. It’s relentlessly violent and over-the-top.
It is also, in the manner of the best black comedies, soul-crushingly sad.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to, as I spin around trying to figure out how to talk about this movie. It’s madcap and uncomfortable and so incredibly sad.
Kang Man-shik is not the first suspected alien Byeong-gu has abducted. He is, from our initial perspective, simply an unlikable corporate boss, a typical rich douchebag. If you’ve seen literally any Korean drama before, you’ve seen this character: the well-connected, corrupt bully CEO. The same is true of the cops that are investigating his abduction. Every one of them is taken right out of the Korean cop show trope list: the promotion-hungry higher-up (Gi Ju-bong), the eccentric outcast detective (Lee Jae-yong), the newcomer eager to prove himself (Lee Ju-hyeon). (I have never seen a Korean crime drama without some versions of those cop characters, and I have watched a lotof Korean crime dramas.)
(Another aside: I sat down to write the first draft of this article while some alarming shit was happening in South Korea. The current political situation on South Korea is beyond the scope of this article, but it is a stark reminder of why themes about corruption and the misuse of power are woven so deeply into Korean media, and how the character tropes and narrative patterns drawn from those themes shape the stories.)
In contrast to Kang Man-shik, Byeong-gu is a peculiar mix of character types: the weirdo who would often be treated as a joke, and a genuinely terrifying murderer. He’s a ranting, drug-addicted conspiracy theorist who wears a helmet to block psychic powers—but he’s also a guy who has constructed, beneath his ramshackle house in the countryside, a fully equipped dungeon where he interrogates, tortures, and eventually kills men he suspects of being alien infiltrators. He’s a sad-sack loser, and he’s a serial killer.
And the movie spends its entire running time not just asking but expecting the audience to sympathize with him.
Not to admire, as we do with intelligent fictional killers like Hannibal Lecter or Dexter Morgan or Jigsaw. Not to fear, as we do with brutal, force-of-nature fictional killers like the Leatherface or Michael Myers. Gyeong-bu is cunning, but he’s also pathetic. He treats his girlfriend badly. He lives in depressing poverty. He still gets pushed around by his old school bully. He imagines himself a hero in order to deny the reality of being a downtrodden outcast. He feeds his victims’ bodies to his dog and doesn’t bother to clean up the bones.
He is not somebody we want to sympathize with, but the emotional demands of the movie are unwavering—and all the more fascinating because of it. We never learn what draws him into believing aliens are trying to take over Earth, so what we see is a man who is violently delusional, not one who is secretly tuned into conspiratorial truths about the world.
I think it’s more common, in stories about unstable revenge killers, to want to explore the hows and whys of how the character got to that point—to show the steps of radicalization, perhaps. When we’re dropped into the killer’s world without context, the story is often cultivating sympathy for the victim—to highlight the disorientation and fear of the person subjected to this torment. But this film goes from zero to torture and telepathic hair right from the start, and still invites sympathy for Byeong-gu.
It’s a fascinating storytelling choice that relies on this solid core: Byeong-gu is an irrevocably broken man. We don’t learn the reasons until much later in the film, and even then only in bits and pieces. The childhood disrupted by his father’s horrifying workplace injury and subsequent abusive behavior, his mother killing his father in self-defense, violent bullying both at school and in juvenile detention, a girlfriend who was killed during a protest, and his mother’s limbo in a years-long coma due to the actions of Kang Man-shik’s pharmaceutical company—all of this is revealed in snippets, much of it very late in the movie, some of it with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quickness.
Byeong-gu is a broken man, a man who has spent his entire life in pain, and it was the relentless tragedies of the ordinary human world that broke him. Corporate negligence. Domestic abuse. School bullying. Police violence. Poverty and mental illness and a lack of support for dealing with them. His mother is on life support. He steals drugs to self-medicate. He seizes on the idea that aliens are responsible for every terrible thing in his life because it’s simpler than trying to understand how so many senseless, unfair, and painful things can happen.
It turns out (I warned you about spoilers!) two awful things can be true. Byeong-gu is violently delusional and none of his victims have been aliens—until now, because Kang Man-shik really is an alien who threatens all of Earth and, in the end, destroys it.
When a movie has a twist ending like this, I have an impulse to analyze it in terms of how much sense it makes, even though I’m not sure my analytical instinct fits with what this movie is doing. There were three possible endings here: the aliens were only ever part of Byeong-gu’s delusions, the aliens were real all along, or the film ends without confirming or denying their existence. A more straightforward thriller film would probably go for the first option, while a more straightforward horror film might go for the ambiguous ending.
Save the Green Planet! chooses the messiest option, which is to make both the delusional behavior and the aliens real. I don’t know that we’re supposed to believe everything Kang Man-shik says in his “confession.” All the stuff about accidentally killing the dinosaurs, the stories of Atlantis and Noah’s Ark, the over-the-top 2001: A Space Odyssey allusion, the sci fi-typical alien moralizing about humanity’s innate violence, the scientific experiments to save us from ourselves…it’s a deliberately convoluted story pieced together from outlandish conspiracy trappings. It there is any truth in it, it seems to be truth heavily filtered through the aliens’ self-aggrandizing propaganda. We do get one verifiable nugget out of all that: the aliens are conducting some kind of experiment—one that kills the experimental subjects with every failure, and every case is a failure.
So, yeah, if what you want is a scientifically rigorous and convincing alien-influenced history of humankind, you won’t find that in this movie. Because, no, it does not make sense, nor does it feel like it’s supposed to.
But if what you want is a movie that says something interesting about violence and power—well, that’s different.
When Kang Man-shik decides to abandon those experiments, he destroys Earth completely. The movie does not frame this choice as the rational action of an advanced species. He is lashing out—a response to trauma and pain, yes, but also a response to wounded pride that his eugenics-like experiment is not successful. Kang Man-shik positions himself and his alien species as god-like saviors of humanity, but his decisions are no different from those of a typical corrupt human CEO. He did terrible things to humans and claimed it was for their own good. He says he wants to save humanity from its own wicked nature, but only if humanity is properly grateful for the uncertain opportunity to be saved. He insists that only humans are uniquely violent, and he casually murders billions—including the cop who saved his life.
Save the Green Planet! is a tragedy, because its horrors sit in that uneasy balance between preventable and inevitable. If only people were better, if only people were less cruel, if wouldn’t have ended up this way. But it did end up this way, and the entire planet is destroyed.
There is an awful futility underlying the whole story. Even if Byeong-gu had been killing aliens all along, it wouldn’t have made a difference. He was killing sadistic teachers and brutal prison guards, and it didn’t make a difference. It was never going to make a difference, because picking off a small number of bullies does not solve the problem of a complex system that rewards corruption and violence. Kang Man-shik’s experiments were never going to achieve what he wanted, because you can’t force people to be better by subjecting them to violence and expecting them to appreciate it.
Sci fi about humans encountering aliens offers a way of looking at ourselves, a way of sticking humanity under a microscope to figure out what makes us tick. Sometimes the focus is on humanity’s noble or admirable traits (such as courage, open-mindedness, curiosity); sometimes it’s on the things we want to believe make us unique (such as creativity, emotion, love); sometimes it’s all about those aspects of ourselves that we hate or want to change (such as greed and violence).
Save the Green Planet! is basically taking all of the ugliest things about humanity—everything that makes up our tremendous capacity to cause each other pain while claiming some imagined moral high ground, on every level from the most personally intimate to the most broadly systemic—and compelling us look at them without blinking. Not to scold or to moralize, but to ask, “Isn’t this ridiculous? Isn’t this insane? What are we doing?”
And there is no answer. The scenes of Byeong-gu’s life that play during the end credits show love, kindness, tenderness—they show all of the good that existed along with the bad, all of the warmth that accompanied the pain, but even that isn’t an answer. It’s just another look through the microscope. Another facet of our messy species. The same open question: What the fuck are we even doing?
What do you think of Save the Green Planet? And its, uh, everything? There is a lot going on here. Spoiler: The dog dies. Because all of Earth dies.
Next week: Let’s finish up the year with 1953’s The War of the Worlds. Watch it on Amazon, Fubo, MGM, Apple, Microsoft. Also, if you feel like it, you can listen to Orson Welles’ 1938 radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ story.
