Save The Green Planet! (2003)

Lee Byeong-gu is on a mission to save the world from certain destruction. Or he’s completely insane. Or both. Whatever the story is, South Korean writer-director Joon-Hwan Jang isn’t giving out many clues in this dazzling first feature.

Byeong-gu, an addictive watcher of sci-fi and horror movies, fears that the world is in danger of being destroyed by space aliens during the next lunar eclipse. He begins his explanation of his theory with the words “You probably think I’m crazy” and he’s right. Surely his story would be more credible if we didn’t see him gobbling methamphetamine pills by the handful, if he wasn’t being guided by a vision of his comatose mother rising from her bed to cheer him on, or if he didn’t believe that the leader of the alien plot is his ex-boss, against whom he has many legitimate grievances.

Stylistically this movie jumps from one genre to the next on nearly every cut, passing through police procedurals, psycho killer flicks, cop-buddy movies, slapstick comedy, fifties sci-fi, classic noir, extreme gore and much in between. The dialogue is Mickey Spillane by way of Quentin Tarantino. “You are my hero.”, the young hot-shot detective explains to the wizened older ex-cop. “I was in middle school when you caught the gas station killer by following that shit smell.”

The first step in saving the planet, by Byeong-gu’s reckoning, is the kidnapping and interrogation of his ex-boss Kang Man-shik, the head of a major chemical company as well as the son-in-law of the police chief of Seoul. Assisted by his faithful girl-friend, tightrope-walker Sooni, who unquestioningly believes everything he tells her, Byeong-gu barely manages to pull the kidnapping off. And following a life long pattern, where nothing works out the way that expects it to, everything goes downhill from there.

The police are equally hapless, with the lead investigator chasing false leads, while the only progress in the case is made a disgraced former detective pursuing his own private investigation along with the rising young star on the force secretly helping him.

Once captured, strapped to a chair, and having had his head shaved (to block his ability to call for help telepathically), Kang refuses to admit to being anything other than an ordinary man, or to stop belittling Byeong-gu when he’s not begging and pleading for mercy. Kang’s continuing denial of the absurd alien plot quickly begins to chip away at Byeong-gu’s credibility, diminishing the prospect that the whole episode is anything more than an outburst of madness from a man who has been demented for a long time.

And as we watch the first of a series of flashbacks to Byeong-gu’s tragic earlier life that explain many of his obsessions and cast him in a sympathetic light, his increasing desperation to find out how to stop the alien plot before the ever-looming deadline leads him to commit a series of acts of increasing violence that make it necessary to wonder if he’s lost all sense of decency along with his sanity.

Referencing a series of movie psychopaths that ranges from Hitchock’s Norman Bates to the Kathy Bates character in Misery and beyond, Joon-Hwan keeps the audience reeling as he repeatedly jumps from the Byeong-gu’s point of view to the way things look to every one else, constantly questioning the reality of what we’ve watched just moments before. And when Kang tries to turn Sooni against her lover by pleading that “Byeong-gu is crazy. He must have watched too many movies”, it’s not hard to see his point.

This is a movie that never stops presenting new surprises along with observations about issues ranging from police state repression to official corruption to the use of ends justify the means arguments to rationalize acts of inhumanity. It takes a long unflinching look at humanity’s obsession with violence and wonders whether it will destroy it us all, and if we even deserve to survive it.