In the new movie Bugonia, Jesse Plemons kidnaps Emma Stone, the CEO of a major local pharmaceutical company, keeping her captive in a basement while coercing her into admitting that she is an alien from Andromeda. The corporate exec finds the whole situation absurd, but Plemons’s character has gone so deep down a conspiratorial rabbit hole that he won’t be deterred. He wants her to confess, and to take him to her leader. It’s the perfect setup for a dark new comedy from Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos, but some movie buffs will also find the plot very familiar.
That’s because Bugonia is a remake of the 2003 Korean classic Save the Green Planet! In that film, Lee Byeong-gu, played by actor Shin Ha-kyun, kidnaps Kang Man-shik, a pharmaceutical exec played by Baek Yoon-sik, who he thinks is an Andromedan invader. He’s helped in the kidnapping by his loyal girlfriend Su-ni, a very childlike acrobat played by Hwang Jeong-min. Bugonia follows the outlines of Save the Green Planet! quite closely, though its style couldn’t be more different with some crucial changes beyond gender-swapping the role of the CEO. And while the remake is great, that shouldn’t stop fans from seeking out the original to get a different take on the same story.
‘Save the Green Planet!’ Has Some Surprising (and Unusual) Hollywood Influences
Save the Green Planet! was the debut feature from writer-director Jang Joon-hwan, who had previously made short films and worked as a cinematographer on several projects. It was one of the signature films from the wave of South Korean movies that caught international attention in the early-to-mid 2000s, though according to its director it was a big financial flop. “I watched the film crash and burn at the box office. It was very painful,” Jang told Little White Lies in an interview last year. Like many Korean thrillers of its time, Save the Green Planet! combines genuine suspense with plenty of comedy, and a heaping dose of graphic, gory violence.
The genesis of Save the Green Planet! is an interesting one. Speaking to the Village Voice in 2005, Jang said of his influences, “I sometimes feel as if movies from all over the world have melted inside me.” As it turns out, many of those influences are Hollywood movies, and some surprising ones, too. Along with an extended homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jang said the film was originally inspired by Rob Reiner’s Stephen King adaptation, Misery, starring Kathy Bates. “I remember liking Misery a lot when it came out,” he said, “but it bothered me that the Kathy Bates character was just this crazy b***h. I knew that I wanted to make a film about kidnapping, but I also knew that I’d have to come at it from the opposite direction. I’d have to take the kidnapper’s point of view.”
In Save the Green Planet!, the kidnapper, Byeong-gu, is the film’s lead character. Though the audience is often left puzzled as to his motivations, wondering how right he might be about his outlandish alien theory, he remains the central figure in the story. Over the course of it, in fact, sympathy for Byeong-gu ebbs and flows. Even when he seems wrong about the conspiracy, his hatred of the CEO he’s kidnapped appears justified. Not only does the company run by Man-shik do terrible things to the public and the environment, they also poisoned Byeong-gu’s mother in a drug trial.
Misery isn’t science-fiction, though, which makes it a curious inspiration for a movie like Save the Green Planet!, which is all about the possibility that there might be aliens secretly running and destroying the world. According to Jang, the idea for the film really solidified when he saw a curious conspiracy theory. “I came across this anti-[Leonardo] DiCaprio website, claiming that he was an alien who was trying to seduce all the women on the planet in order to conquer earth, the two ideas seemed to fit,” Jang told the Village Voice.
‘Bugonia’ Puts ‘Save the Green Planet!’s Anti-Capitalist POV in a New Context
The remake, Bugonia, isn’t just a comedic kidnapping thriller, though. It’s a sharply political film, about the wealthy, corrupt, elite forces running the world and making things worse for the average person. It’s also about the way this reality can quickly morph into a destructive kind of conspiracy theory that erases solidarity among the victims of corporate malfeasance, and only leads to violence in the end. This, too, is taken from the original film, though time and setting mean there are important differences in how its political message needs to be understood.
In 2003, South Korea was only a couple of decades removed from being run by a military dictatorship, which activists fought against in the street. Scenes in Save the Green Planet! allude to events like the 1980 Kwangju massacre, a terrible event sometimes referred to as Korea’s Tiananmen Square. Though the movie’s anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist themes are universally relevant, even today, it is also specifically about how an older form of authoritarian control in Korea may have simply been replaced by a more insidious, corporatized form of the same.
“When I was growing up, South Korea was rapidly becoming an industrialised society, and it had this period of huge growth that we achieved in a matter of decades. Within that time, there were numerous conflicts and clashes in the media—accidents and incidents leading to arguments and fights, and some companies even mobilized gangsters called the gusadae to commit violence against protesting workers,” Jang told Little White Lies. “I kept seeing characters like Kang Man-shik in the media, who could be full of avarice and exploitative of their workers—and so he became a sort of representative figure of this in a villain-like way.”
As a contrast, Jang explained, “Byeong-gu’s house, meanwhile, is set in a coal mining town because images of the coal mine collapse and strike in the ’70s—which I saw on a black and white TV when I was young—remained vivid in my mind.”
A remake of Save the Green Planet! was first discussed in 2017 and 2018, after the release of Jang’s film 1987: When the Day Comes. In fact, it was Jang’s idea to have his debut film remade. CJ Entertainment had suggested setting up a project overseas, and the director instantly thought of Save the Green Planet! and how it could benefit from being remade in a different system, with a new setting and new actors.
Hereditary director Ari Aster, a big fan of the film, soon came on board to help produce the remake, with Jang originally intended to direct. He worked with writer Will Tracy (Succession, Mountainhead) on the script, but soon health issues got in the way, and Jang had to drop out of directing. Instead, they contacted Lanthimos, who agreed to take the reins, with Stone and Plemons starring.
Asked for his feelings about the remake, Jang told Little White Lies, “Of course, it’s very exciting and fun for me—but there is another way to think about it. Our tiny planet hasn’t changed very much, and it remains this very violent world where wars are erupting and people are fighting one another. In that way, I feel it’s also a shame!” Thankfully, both films now exist in the world, and both are great, a rare feat when it comes to remaking a classic.
- Release Date
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October 31, 2025
- Runtime
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118 minutes
- Director
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Yorgos Lanthimos
- Writers
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Will Tracy, Jang Joon-hwan
- Producers
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Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Emma Stone, Lars Knudsen, Miky Lee, Ari Aster, Jerry Kyoungboum Ko
