Save the Green Planet! 4K 2003 Ultra HD 2160p

A traumatized young man abducts Korean leaders, believing they're toxic reptilian aliens - a fifth column launching a takeover of beloved Earth. Stumped law enforcement geniuses half-seriously hire a disgraced, disheveled private detective with a long-ago history of super-crime solving. The alienated South Korean youngster Lee Byeong-gu builds an isolated basement command post/torture chamber/film studio to force the awful truth out of the slimy, uncooperative politicians and businesspeople, then alert the public. Byeong-gu is helped by his devoted girlfriend, who buys his theories, but wonders if his horrible childhood has colored his thinking.

User Review

The long-gone year of 2003 was a turning point for Korean cinema... Although, why beat around the bush? It was also a turning point for world cinema! Two rising stars of Korean auteur mainstream cinema, Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho, made the most significant films of their careers. Their works instantly won over critics and audiences around the world; were successfully screened at prestigious film festivals, and broke down the barriers of strict genre orientation, showing other directors that any story can be transferred to the screen without being constrained by the framework of a particular genre, which allows the narrative to “breathe” freely and touch on many issues. The expressive Tarantino and the authoritative critic Roger Ebert immediately dubbed Oldboy and Memories of Murder Asian cinematic gems, and the Korean cinema that produced them as an interesting and unusual phenomenon that would give birth to many more masterpieces in the future, setting the tone for the entire film world.

Amidst the chorus of enthusiastic cries and eloquent reviews addressed to these two films, the bewildered viewer (especially the South Korean one) did not notice Jang Joon-hwan's curious film debut, Save the Green Planet! This film was intriguing, if only for its original plot, which revolved around a former factory worker kidnapping his boss, whom he obsessively believed to belong to an unfriendly alien race that was preparing to destroy Earth on the day of the next eclipse. A rational-minded person, upon hearing the film's premise, immediately falls into a slight stupor and does not know how to react to it. And this is not surprising, because Save the Green Planet! is a transformative film: a hybrid of social satire, black comedy, conspiracy drama, revenge story, and thriller about cold-blooded maniacs.

The director takes genre matrices and, like a chemist, conducts an entertaining experiment with them, boldly mixing them together to create something new—a cinematic phenomenon never seen before.
As a result, an ordinary story about the kidnapping of a rich man imperceptibly flows into a UFO horror story with secret conspiracies (à la The X-Files), then turns into a tragic parable about obsession with revenge—which has consumed the sanity of a once good-natured young man— — and, by the end, takes on a global scale, culminating in the fatal irreversibility of a planetary cataclysm. And all this exotic, seemingly inedible sauce is seasoned with a generous portion of sarcasm and cinematic references. The tense action is punctuated by hilarious imitations of iconic scenes from Kubrick's “Space Odyssey” and “Planet of the Apes”; The secondary characters, deliberately drawn by the author from stereotypical stories, dilute the suspense with the flatness of their personalities and views, reminding the viewer that they should broaden their horizons to see “something more” around them.

However, the basic pattern of the film, which bizarrely weaves all of the above together, remains the confrontation between the captive and his tormentor. These two characters, in the course of the film's narrative, force the viewer to question their motives and priorities more than once. Initially, the kidnapped Korean businessman, with his provocative and insolent behavior, arouses acute hostility, and you involuntarily want to wish him some suffering; but when the director reveals some of his cards, the evaluative emphasis changes dramatically! And now you find yourself clenching your fists as you watch this poor wretch, who has endured countless brutal and absurd abuses, reach his trembling hand through a basement hatch and try to signal for help. Meanwhile, your brain, digesting certain episodes of the film, is frantically racked with doubts: maybe he has something to hide? Insensitive to pain, he survived a 300-volt electric shock and much, much more... Truly, the director's bold script plays with the inertia of the audience's emotions and expectations. But most of all, it works with the young man Byung-gu; his character, with all his oddities, not only makes you distance yourself from him, but also empathize with him and believe that all his hypotheses about aliens will ultimately be confirmed.
After all, through short flashbacks from his past, the viewer learns about the kidnapper's difficult life: bullying by teachers and classmates, the early death of his father, the tragic loss of his beloved girlfriend... yes, yes, there are reasons to go crazy. And Ben Gu has no choice but to take revenge on this cruel society (albeit by inventing fantastic tales of an alien invasion)... or did he invent them after all?

Okay. To agonize over whether it was fiction or reality is a purely personal matter for everyone who watches this film. Perhaps what makes it so remarkable is that it raises many questions and assumptions, lingering in the memory for a long time. Save the Green Planet! received a whole bunch of international awards (including the grand prize at the Moscow Film Festival), but failed miserably in its homeland. After that, the talented director remained in obscurity for another ten years before releasing his next film. So, by following the beaten path, you may miss something equally interesting. And by the way, be sure to watch the mini-film during the final credits: it is an important semantic correction that opens up a diametrically opposite perspective on what happened on screen, changing all interpretations.

Info Video

Codec: HEVC / H.265 (94.0 Mb/s)
Resolution: 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.78:1

Info Audio

#Korean: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
#Korean: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Commentary by director Jang Joon-hwan and actor Shin Ha-kyun (2003))
#English: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Commentary by critic and disc producer Pierce Conran and special effects artist Dan Martin (2026))

Info Subtitles