Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | November 4, 2025
This piece contains spoilers for both Bugonia and Save the Green Planet!
Bugonia, the latest film by Yorgos Lanthimos, is a very dark film. Written by The Menu’s Will Tracy, the pitch-black dramedy delves into the oblivion of conspiracy, ecological terror, and corporate control. Teddy (Jesse Plemons) kidnaps Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, whom he believes is actually an alien. What unfolds is a bleak view of humanity and a world that might be better off without us clogging up the atmosphere.
As you can tell from that synopsis, it’s an odd movie, although nowhere near the oddest thing Lanthimos has ever made. But it’s also a remake of a little-seen South Korean film that is hard to find and will probably go unseen by most viewers of Bugonia. Released in 2003 and directed by Jang Joon-hwan, Save the Green Planet! (the exclamation point is not optional) was not a hit in its homeland, although it did win several major awards. The set-up is the same: Byeong-gu, a man who believes aliens from the Andromeda galaxy have infiltrated Earth, kidnaps Kang Man-shik, a pharmaceutical executive he believes to be an alien commander. Cue wackiness, escape attempts, and torture via liquid painkiller.
Structurally, both films are extremely similar. Do not expect a ton of plot changes from original to remake here. It starts and ends identically. Little details from the original remain, like the protagonist’s belief that the aliens communicate through their hair and thus require shavings. Both films use bees as a key allegory for the unity of workers being exploited by outside forces and of the planet’s crumbling environmental foundations. They’re also both featured in a death scene involving a cop. Both Byeong-gu and Teddy are in part motivated by their mothers’ health struggles, and the root of their ailments being within the CEO’s company.
Both men are also, in part, aided in their plots by a semi-willing participant. Byeong-gu has his girlfriend, Su-ni, and Teddy coerces his cousin Don into being his accomplice. Su-ni is portrayed as a kindly but simple-minded woman who just wants to do whatever her boyfriend asks for, although she does leave him for a while when things get too violent. She’s not explicitly portrayed as neurodivergent or mentally disabled, but the implication is there. With Don, we have an explicitly autistic character played by an actor, the newcomer Aidan Delbis, who is on the autism spectrum. This adds a new element of nastiness to our protagonist. He’s not an explicit hero in Save the Green Planet!, given that he tortures and kills people, but he’s never cruel to his partner. Teddy, by comparison, frequently takes advantage of his lonely cousin. As much as he believes his own conspiracies, he’s also not above using fearmongering to keep Don in place. At one point, he pushes him into being chemically castrated so that he won’t be tempted by those wily alien seductresses.
This is but one change that makes the protagonist of Bugonia a far pricklier figure to viewers than that of Save the Green Planet! Teddy is damaged, but he’s also a bully, a loser, and a misogynist. Apparently, it was producer Ari Aster’s idea to change the gender of the kidnapped CEO and accused alien, and doing so drastically changed the dynamic between the two main characters. Michelle may be a ruthless girlboss CEO whose company is, at the very least, evil-adjacent, but watching her be electrocuted and choked by Teddy is undoubtedly disturbing. It deliberately evokes images of domestic violence.
Teddy is also largely denied much of the sympathy bestowed upon Byeong-gu. In the Korean film, we get a few flashbacks of his truly terrible life, one forever plagued by strife and bullies who have left him with an unbalanced view of himself and his fellow humans. Even his prisoner is moved by his pain at one point. Yes, Teddy also has a sick mother and a pretty crappy life, but his misanthropy is far more corrosive. For my money, I think this somewhat weakens Bugonia. Lanthimos is aiming for caustic and cruel, but that ‘everyone sucks’ hopelessness doesn’t land as effectively when you’re left with the image of a man strangling a woman who is bound to a chair.
Neither of these movies is especially hopeful about the fate of mankind. The aliens destroying Earth is played as a sick joke in both narratives. But it’s Bugonia that feels the most caustic about it. Byeong-gu may be a madman, but his tragic backstory is so thoroughly conveyed that we feel his loss and mourn it. Teddy, meanwhile, might be right about the aliens, but that doesn’t negate his cruelty, misogyny, or generally disturbed views on others, human or otherwise. He doesn’t die at Michelle’s hands after a fight to the end like Byeong-gu; it’s a fluke spurred on by his own stupidity. Save the Green Planet! offers a Dr. Strangelove-esque irony to its ending, making it almost cartoonish. Bugonia lingers on scene after scene of dead bodies. But they also leave the planet alone and don’t blow it up like in the Korean film. The Earth is worth salvaging. Just not its most boisterous and self-obsessed residents. If one thing unites original and remake, it is this core message: maybe the planet does need saving from us, at any cost.
