Save the Green Planet!

Informed by a life filled with misery and brutal hardship, Shin Ha-kyun's Lee Byeong-gu has come to the inescapable conclusion that the Earth simply must have been covertly colonised by alien beings from the Andromeda Galaxy. So, how does Byeong-gu - an unhinged, one-man resistance - go about battling back against the oppressive forces orchestrating human tragedy? Kidnapping and torture, naturally. Writer-director Jang Joon-hwan's Save the Green Planet! begins with Byeong-gu stalking his latest victim, a stingy pharmaceutical executive who, Byeong-gu believes, is an extraterrestrial capable of contacting his planet's poised invasion forces. Whether or not these fanciful deductions have any actual purchase within the piece Byeong-gu has, unmistakable, hit on something regarding the ways in which sadistic aspects of the establishment - specifically those who crave and cultivate power - treat those they deem to be inferior. Towards the end of Jang's film this idea is repeatedly underlined by a series of disconnected montages that vividly detail the kind of cruel impassivity that informs these revelations. 

First, there's a secret history of planet Earth as told by Baek Yoon-sik's shaved and scorched executive that either reveals the meddling hand of Andromedan invaders or, in the style of The Usual Suspects, confidently draws from the dogeared, conspiracy flavoured ephemera scattered about Byeong-gu's sunken, sweaty lair. Here mankind is described as a rolling mistake, incapable of overcoming their innate thirst for self-destructive violence. We see a vision of the biblical Adam, this hirsute hominid tethered via an umbilical cord to one of Stanley Kubrick's monoliths, and the creation of Eve via some genetic splicing. This Adam's instant reaction to the helpless, naked woman presented to him is to attack her with a cudgel then rape her. A second, less esoteric compilation flicks through the defining events of Byeong-gu's life: seeing his father's arm blasted away from his trunk in a mining accident; the ridicule and beatings he endured, from teachers, for his diminished station in life; and the violent death, at the hands of policemen, of a young woman he was fixated upon. In all of these moments the stunted and childlike Byeong-gu was an impotent observer, able only to endure what was happening to and around him. Although their subject matter varies wildly, both sequences hum with the same depressing note: a great many people are destined to suffer terribly in their lives, for no other reason than it provides amusement for those who hold authority over them.