Save the Green Planet
I think it’s been almost a year since I started seeing this film, but I just couldn’t get through it. There are some films I have blogged about but have not seen in total, like “Salò”, but I still feel like I have seen enough to say something about it. It’s not like I am being Roger Ebert saying something like “I don’t think you need to see Tropa de Elite, I assume it’s the same thing as Tropa de Elite 2” – oh gosh.
However, I have a certain inexplicable fascination with “Salò”, like everybody does I suppose, but much less so with “Save the Green Planet”. Let me mention its good points first: I thought it was incredibly well-done, well-crafted, well-acted – everything about the film screams high quality to you, even though it was apparently also done on the cheap. I thought this is quite impressive considering the high amount of decent-looking CG and post-processing. I thought all the actors in the film were splendid, especially Shin Ha-kyun who is one of the reasons why I watched the film in the first place.
Sadly, that is it. The film was a recommendation from quite a bunch of people from the Korean Blogathon back then, and now I have to question these people’s tastes quite seriously. Or rather, I don’t know who they are and now I am even less inclined to find out. “Save the Green Planet” is advertised as a black comedy, or must at least have some comical elements in it. I thought “The Host” was funny, even though it wasn’t quite advertised as a comedy, but this film is practically the opposite. It’s downright painful. Everything about the film is excruciatingly sad, I thought it was so unbearable I stopped watching. Later on, I wanted to know what it was all about, skimmed through the middle part and watched the end… The film brought out literally every single cliché about evil humans, from starving African kids to concentration camps. It’s even claiming that only humans are cruel animals out there, in how they kill each other and oppress others for their own benefit. I am pretty sure that quite a lot of animals do exactly the same thing, if not even “worse”. Bottom line: The plot of the film is rather stupid, amazingly sad and seems to have no value whatsoever.
Next time, please somebody recommend a good Korean movie to me. Thanks.