Director/Screenplay – Jang Joon-hwan, Producers – Kim Seon-a & Seoung Jae-cha, Photography – Hong Kyung-pyo, Music – Lee Dong-jun, Visual Effects – Mofac Studio (Supervisor – Jang Seongho), Production Design – Jang Geun-yeong & Kim Kyeong-hie. Production Company – CJ Entertainment.
Cast
Shin Ha-kyun (Lee Byeong-gu), Baek Yoon-sik (Kang Man-shik), Lee Jae-yong (Detective Chu), Hwang Jeong-min (Soo-ni), Lee Ju-hyeon (Detective Kim), Gi Ju-bong (Chief Lee), Ye Soo-jung (Byeong-gu’s Mother)
Plot
Lee Byeong-gu and his girlfriend the acrobat Soo-ni abduct Kang Man-shik, the CEO of a pharmaceuticals company. Byeong-gu imprisons Man-shik in the basement at the apiary he runs in the countryside. Byeong-gu is certain that Man-sik is an alien from Andromeda come to pave the way for an upcoming invasion. He tortures Man-sik to get him to confess the truth, even as Man-sik avidly denies that he is an alien. Byeong-gu has had mental health issues ever since his mother was placed in a coma due to tests conducted by Man-sik’s company. He has abducted and tortured others believing them to be aliens. Meanwhile, Chu, an individualistic police detective, is on the case of Man-sik’s disappearance and follows his own hunches that lead him to Byeong-gu.
Save the Green Planet was the directorial debut for South Korean director Jang Joon-hwan who has since gone on to make the non-genre likes of the crime film Hwayi: A Monster Boy (2013) and the historical 1987 (2017). I became intrigued by Save the Green Planet with the news that it was about to be remade by Yorgos Lanthimos as Bugonia (2025) and so thought I should check the original out.
Save the Green Planet was billed and sold as a wacky SF film. That is not inaccurate a description of what it is, but I don’t think it is primarily what the film is about. Instead, I would label it as primarily an Imprisonment Thriller. There have been a great many of these – see my essay Imprisonment Thrillers for an overview of the genre. Save the Green Planet is one of these in that the main plot is about one man imprisoned in a cellar by another and his struggle to escape. There are all the tropes of the genre – the near escape attempts and recapture, the investigating police detective who comes too close and so on.
Most of the other films listed under Imprisonment Thrillers are thrillers, whereas Save the Green Planet differs in that the focus is a comedic one. Moreover, in a standard Imprisonment Thriller, the person imprisoned will be a sympathetic protagonist and we will empathise with them as they attempt to escape, feel frustration as their efforts are thwarted and so on. By contrast here, the imprisoned individual of the pharmaceutical CEO is not a very likeable individual. The abductor (Shin Ha-kyun) is not that much more sympathetic – he is painted as delusional and does some quite sadistic things in his determination to get the truth, not to mention is revealed to have killed several people – but our sympathies on balance are placed with him more so than they are with Baek Yoon-sik’s CEO prisoner.
(l to r) abductor Lee Byeong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun), imprisoned CEO Baek Yoon-sik and acrobat girlfriend Hwang Jeong-min
Save the Green Planet plays out with such a crazy premise – businessman is abducted and locked up being tortured by a clearly delusional individual who insists that the businessman is in fact an alien impersonator and tortures him to prove it – that you wonder where on Earth the film is going to go. For the most part, the film plays out mundanely around the complications of escape and recapture and a B plot where what is happened is discovered by dogged detective Lee Jae-yong. For all it being pitched as a wacky SF film, the drama is grounded and realistic. And in thriller terms, the complications are nothing that sophisticated.
The film takes a left field turn near the end where [PLOT SPOILERS] it reveals that Shin Ha-kyun was right after all and that Baek Yoon-sik really is an alien and part of a beachhead to invade the Earth. It ends up a film where you aren’t sure where to place your sympathies throughout and then at the end have to throw your hands up and realise that the mad torturer was right after all. Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of this is a potted recount of the origins of humanity that manages to wind in Atlantis, an SF version of Noah’s Ark and clear references to the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
