Save The Green Planet

One film I'm always recommending to people, is the extremely quirky Korean genre-bender Save The Green Planet. It's a masterpiece that manages to effortless stride through a number of genres, being part black comedy, part Sci-Fi, while almost descending into Silence of the Lambs territory, and back to heartfelt drama, without so much as missing a beat, or feeling disjointed.

The plot follows the exploits of Lee Byeong-gu (played by the terrific Ha-kyun Shin) who not only believes aliens are among us, but that they're planning something diabolical, and he only has until the next lunar eclipse to do something about it. He sets about kidknapping the president of a large company, Kang Man-shik (Yun-shik Baek), whom Lee believes is an alien, and begins to torture a confession from him.

While Save The Green Planet isn't exactly a torture movie, it does feature it as a sizeable portion of the plot, but what's really fantastic here is that the basis of these scenes is more about character than gore. The film is set up so that both captor and captive are sympathetic, and garner our support, so much so that our sympathies and loyalties and constantly vied for throughout. What ensues is a gripping battle of wills, and despite being stripped to his underwear and bound to a chair for half the film, President Kang holds as many cards as his kidnapper, and can fight just as powerfully from a mere verbal standpoint. It's nothing short of a remarkable performance on the part of Baek.

Mixing genres can sometimes come off terribly, I can't recount the amount of Horror / Comedy films that have failed miserably, very few can pull it off such as Shaun of the Dead. So when Save The Green Planet came along, I really was in awe of just how terrific every facet of the experience was, there's a wickedly dark sense of humour running through the film, but when it's time for it to be thrilling, it's every bit as well paced and tense as anything else out there. It's an incredible achievement by writer and director Joon-Hwan Jang.

I think I was very lucky to see the film without knowing a single thing about it (Apart from the fact that it was South Korean) when it played at a local film festival, and I was pretty blown away. Since then I've always made an effort to name drop it as often as I can, and introduce as many people as I possibly can to it, because it deserves a much wider audience. Extremely well recommended.