Bong Joon-ho's first English-language feature, Snowpiercer, was an absolute home-run for me, and possibly my favourite film of the decade. A wild satire of class inequality set on a post-apocalyptic science-fiction train, Snowpiercer is one of the most creative films in recent memory, completely unpredictable, with each new train car introducing a new twist, elevated by Bong Joon-ho's dark sense of humour and the completely insane characters he populates his universe with. Tilda Swinton's performance is particularly notable.
And Snowpiercer isn't even Bong's best movie; Memories of Murder and Mother are bonafide classics, at this point. Suffice it to say, that I was incredibly excited for Okja, even though I purposely avoided reading anything about it prior to watching it. I had no idea what Okja was going to be about, and, well, I was completely blown away by what it turned out to be.
As it turns out, Okja is, I would say, a close sister film to Snowpiercer. It is every bit as creative and unpredictable, darkly hilarious and filled with Bong Joon-ho's classic insane characters, as Snowpiercer was. Tilda Swinton even returns, to give her performance in that film a run for its money, and this time she has some competition from the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal, who has never given a performance as wild as this one.
But whereas Snowpiercer satirizes class inequality, Okja is a satire of the food industry, a subject matter I think is long overdue for satirizing, which I never would have expected from Bong (or any Korean filmmaker), but which he absolutely nailed. I would like to focus the rest of my review on this point, because I think it's extremely important.
Okja is about a little girl, Mija, who's grown up on a small Korean farm in the mountains with her grandfather, and her best friend, a genetically-modified "super-pig" given to them by a big American company to raise, as part of a marketing campaign. When it comes time to introduce this new "environmentally sustainable" super-pig meat to market, unbeknownst to Mija, her super-pig is to be flown back to America for a promotional event, and ultimately to be slaughtered. When she finds out her grandfather relinquished the pig behind her back, Mija - a precocious, determined child - sets out on her own to get her friend back. Her journey ultimately puts her at the crossroads between a slew of crazy characters from the American company, "Mirando Corp" (including Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal) and an extremist animal rights activist group called the "Animal Liberation Front" (including Paul Dano and Steven Yeun).
Although Bong Joon-ho is in top form here, I feel that Okja has been largely overlooked, even dismissed by many of Bong's fans as his worst film, and the "criticism" that I've heard about it is that it's "anti-meat", or even "vegan propaganda". I was taken off-guard when I first heard this, since I really didn't see it this way at all, and the attack essentially nullifies my recommendation of the film, as someone who happens to abstain from animal products. That said, I think this perspective is absurd for all kinds of reasons, that are easy enough to reel off.
For a start, Bong Joon-ho, who wrote this movie, eats meat, and comes from a culture where veganism hardly exists. The characters we're meant to sympathize or identify with, the rural Korean farmers, are seen eating chicken and fish, sustainably, off their farm. Moreover, the only presumably "vegan" characters, the animal activist characters, are depicted as completely ridiculous and impossible to take seriously (Paul Dano's best scene has him kicking the crap out of an incapacitated Steven Yeun, Goodfellas-style, for betraying their group's commitment to non-violence). Finally, the word "vegan" is never uttered and the concept never comes up in the script.
What the film does do, however, is what all good dark comedies do (and Okja is above-all a good dark comedy), and that is to ground its fantasy in harsh realities; to look at reality head-on, without illusions, and create something from out of that reality to make me smile. This is not a cartoon, where the funny talking farm animals go on an adventure, and every effort is made to avoid us making any connection between those farm animals, and our dinner. In Okja, when the journey eventually takes us to a slaughterhouse, Bong, who visited a slaughterhouse in research for the film, depicts the slaughterhouse, roughly, as a slaughterhouse. Some people find these scenes upsetting; since I personally have no illusions about what slaughterhouses are, I wasn't upset just by being reminded that they exist; I was simply engaged in the insane drama unfolding there. If a film depicting a slaughterhouse as a slaughterhouse makes you feel you're being moralized to, I can't help you. If you think a film is "vegan propaganda" because it depicts a slaughterhouse like a slaughterhouse, I think that says more about your own insecurity about your food choices that it does the film.
But maybe more importantly, I think it says something about the way this subject matter is just kind of a taboo across Hollywood and media generally. How often does food sustainability come up in the realm of non-documentary movies? Some basic facts: the animal agriculture industry is the biggest polluter in the world by far, animals in factory farms are often treated far worse than anything depicted in Okja, and a drastic reduction in global meat consumption is necessary to have any chance of halting climate change. (A properly-planned whole-foods plant-based diet is also the healthiest way to eat, by the way). These are just basic facts that everybody should know, and which shouldn't be controversial in any way, and yet which are so omitted from the conversation, that when you even approach this subject matter it is somehow contentious. And I think that's a strength of Okja, that it's about the only fiction film I can think of that even approaches this important subject matter.
Interestingly, another film came out in the same year as Okja, with a strikingly similar plot: The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro. The Shape of Water is also about a girl (or woman) who develops a relationship with a fantasy creature, only to have to rescue the creature from an evil corporation (and an over-the-top villain) that "owns" the creature and plans to do it harm. I loved The Shape of Water and found it extremely engaging for many of the same reasons as I did Okja, although I generally found Okja to be a bit more wild and enjoyable. Where The Shape of Water differs thematically from Okja, however, is in what the creature represents. While Okja, the super-pig, satirizes the food industry, the creature in The Shape of Water is a parable for racism, if anything; at any rate a more "safe" subject matter. It's interesting that that film went on to win the top prize at the Oscars, while Okja was pretty much ignored at awards season.
Following Okja, Bong Joon-ho returned to the "more safe" (but equally important) class inequality theme from Snowpiercer with a much more toned down, scaled back (but still flawlessly executed) film called Parasite, which, also quite interestingly, became the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. I couldn't be happier for his win, or the spotlight it's put on Korean cinema, however I can't help but wish he'd received this attention two years earlier, when he really, really deserved it, for making a truly original and phenomenal film on a topic nobody else is apparently brave enough to touch. Okja was easily my favourite film of the year in 2017, and as I'm still thinking about it and writing about it three years later, I have to say it's another strong candidate for my favourite film of the decade.
And Snowpiercer isn't even Bong's best movie; Memories of Murder and Mother are bonafide classics, at this point. Suffice it to say, that I was incredibly excited for Okja, even though I purposely avoided reading anything about it prior to watching it. I had no idea what Okja was going to be about, and, well, I was completely blown away by what it turned out to be.
As it turns out, Okja is, I would say, a close sister film to Snowpiercer. It is every bit as creative and unpredictable, darkly hilarious and filled with Bong Joon-ho's classic insane characters, as Snowpiercer was. Tilda Swinton even returns, to give her performance in that film a run for its money, and this time she has some competition from the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal, who has never given a performance as wild as this one.
But whereas Snowpiercer satirizes class inequality, Okja is a satire of the food industry, a subject matter I think is long overdue for satirizing, which I never would have expected from Bong (or any Korean filmmaker), but which he absolutely nailed. I would like to focus the rest of my review on this point, because I think it's extremely important.
Okja is about a little girl, Mija, who's grown up on a small Korean farm in the mountains with her grandfather, and her best friend, a genetically-modified "super-pig" given to them by a big American company to raise, as part of a marketing campaign. When it comes time to introduce this new "environmentally sustainable" super-pig meat to market, unbeknownst to Mija, her super-pig is to be flown back to America for a promotional event, and ultimately to be slaughtered. When she finds out her grandfather relinquished the pig behind her back, Mija - a precocious, determined child - sets out on her own to get her friend back. Her journey ultimately puts her at the crossroads between a slew of crazy characters from the American company, "Mirando Corp" (including Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal) and an extremist animal rights activist group called the "Animal Liberation Front" (including Paul Dano and Steven Yeun).
Although Bong Joon-ho is in top form here, I feel that Okja has been largely overlooked, even dismissed by many of Bong's fans as his worst film, and the "criticism" that I've heard about it is that it's "anti-meat", or even "vegan propaganda". I was taken off-guard when I first heard this, since I really didn't see it this way at all, and the attack essentially nullifies my recommendation of the film, as someone who happens to abstain from animal products. That said, I think this perspective is absurd for all kinds of reasons, that are easy enough to reel off.
For a start, Bong Joon-ho, who wrote this movie, eats meat, and comes from a culture where veganism hardly exists. The characters we're meant to sympathize or identify with, the rural Korean farmers, are seen eating chicken and fish, sustainably, off their farm. Moreover, the only presumably "vegan" characters, the animal activist characters, are depicted as completely ridiculous and impossible to take seriously (Paul Dano's best scene has him kicking the crap out of an incapacitated Steven Yeun, Goodfellas-style, for betraying their group's commitment to non-violence). Finally, the word "vegan" is never uttered and the concept never comes up in the script.
What the film does do, however, is what all good dark comedies do (and Okja is above-all a good dark comedy), and that is to ground its fantasy in harsh realities; to look at reality head-on, without illusions, and create something from out of that reality to make me smile. This is not a cartoon, where the funny talking farm animals go on an adventure, and every effort is made to avoid us making any connection between those farm animals, and our dinner. In Okja, when the journey eventually takes us to a slaughterhouse, Bong, who visited a slaughterhouse in research for the film, depicts the slaughterhouse, roughly, as a slaughterhouse. Some people find these scenes upsetting; since I personally have no illusions about what slaughterhouses are, I wasn't upset just by being reminded that they exist; I was simply engaged in the insane drama unfolding there. If a film depicting a slaughterhouse as a slaughterhouse makes you feel you're being moralized to, I can't help you. If you think a film is "vegan propaganda" because it depicts a slaughterhouse like a slaughterhouse, I think that says more about your own insecurity about your food choices that it does the film.
But maybe more importantly, I think it says something about the way this subject matter is just kind of a taboo across Hollywood and media generally. How often does food sustainability come up in the realm of non-documentary movies? Some basic facts: the animal agriculture industry is the biggest polluter in the world by far, animals in factory farms are often treated far worse than anything depicted in Okja, and a drastic reduction in global meat consumption is necessary to have any chance of halting climate change. (A properly-planned whole-foods plant-based diet is also the healthiest way to eat, by the way). These are just basic facts that everybody should know, and which shouldn't be controversial in any way, and yet which are so omitted from the conversation, that when you even approach this subject matter it is somehow contentious. And I think that's a strength of Okja, that it's about the only fiction film I can think of that even approaches this important subject matter.
Interestingly, another film came out in the same year as Okja, with a strikingly similar plot: The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro. The Shape of Water is also about a girl (or woman) who develops a relationship with a fantasy creature, only to have to rescue the creature from an evil corporation (and an over-the-top villain) that "owns" the creature and plans to do it harm. I loved The Shape of Water and found it extremely engaging for many of the same reasons as I did Okja, although I generally found Okja to be a bit more wild and enjoyable. Where The Shape of Water differs thematically from Okja, however, is in what the creature represents. While Okja, the super-pig, satirizes the food industry, the creature in The Shape of Water is a parable for racism, if anything; at any rate a more "safe" subject matter. It's interesting that that film went on to win the top prize at the Oscars, while Okja was pretty much ignored at awards season.
Following Okja, Bong Joon-ho returned to the "more safe" (but equally important) class inequality theme from Snowpiercer with a much more toned down, scaled back (but still flawlessly executed) film called Parasite, which, also quite interestingly, became the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. I couldn't be happier for his win, or the spotlight it's put on Korean cinema, however I can't help but wish he'd received this attention two years earlier, when he really, really deserved it, for making a truly original and phenomenal film on a topic nobody else is apparently brave enough to touch. Okja was easily my favourite film of the year in 2017, and as I'm still thinking about it and writing about it three years later, I have to say it's another strong candidate for my favourite film of the decade.