Poster odd - check; odd fonts used - check.
That's it, don't think we need anything else.
dir: Yorgos Lanthimos
2025
People believe some crazy shit these days… I mean, people believed a heap of stuff that wasn’t true in the past, but it takes real effort, real commitment to believe patently untrue things these days.
I mean, being a flat earther 500 years ago was the default. Believing it now, well, that takes wilful blind ignorance.
If you tell me a theory that aliens from the Andromeda galaxy are on Earth for no better reason than to kill the bees, I’m going to say “okay, thanks for sharing” and then back away slowly with my hands up in a gesture meant to convey “everyone stay chill” .
But then if you’re Teddy (Jesse Plemons), and you’ve struck upon this theory as the explanation for why everything has gone wrong in your life, and this is the latest theory out of hundreds of conspiracy theories that you’ve come to believe, you’re going to cling to it bitterly, for dear life, to the exclusion of all else.
But it’s not enough to know the truth – you need to convince at least one other person that it’s true as well, otherwise you’re just a solo loon. So Teddy has to enlist his younger autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to help in his two-person struggle against intergalactic forces.
Surely these two fuckheads will save us all?
The target of their ire is the CEO of a company that Teddy happens to work for, and she, played by Emma Stone, doesn’t do herself any favours, since she’s a CEO, and we know they’re all evil even if they’re not from another galaxy.
They might as well be from other galaxies, considering how little they have in common with the rest of us scum. Anyone who gets up at 4.30am in order to do yoga without a gun to her head is clearly not in touch with their humanity. Humans want to sleep. Humans crave sleep. CEOs probably see it as an unproductive use of time and effort.
Also witness her horrible passive aggressive bullshit about how employees are free to leave at 5.30pm, but they should feel free to keep working if they really feel like it and if work needs doing.
But, despite my well-reasoned and carefully thought out animosity towards CEOs, I have to acknowledge that what transpires throughout this flick is pretty horrible, and even they don’t deserve to be kidnapped, chained to a chair, forcibly have their heads shaven, or be covered in antihistamine creams.
Teddy is so convinced that Michelle, the CEO, is from the Andromeda galaxy that nothing will dissuade him. I am unsure if the fixation is meant to be indicative of his being mentally ill, or that he’s just so desperate for something that explains everything, that he can’t let go, but either way it’s unsettling. Plemons has played psychopaths a few times in various media, but that’s not what he’s going for here, which is to the benefit of the movie. The character is pathetic, but there are a bunch of reasons why his life has reduced thusly, and why he clings so gruesomely to his idiotic version of the “truth”.
We have no doubt that Don is just along for the ride. Whatever chances he had for a ‘normal’ life, in Teddy’s orbit, he will be dragged down by Teddy’s fanaticism, no matter what he actually believes. At no stage does it ever seem like Don believes any of the nonsense about aliens and other galaxies, but he, too, longs for a time in the past “when we were little, before things got bad”, in his own words.
He’s never had much of a chance at living a life, perhaps thanks to Teddy or perhaps due to their living circumstances, which seem less than ideal. He submits reluctantly to Teddy’s strict exercise and injection regimen because he wants to keep Teddy happy, not because he believes in any of it. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many or most of the heartbreaking moments are because of Don and the sadness he brings to having missed out on life.
It’s hard to have as much sympathy for Teddy. Yes, awful things have happened to him, like his mother being in a coma for decades because of a medical fuckup on Michelle’s company’s part, and something even worse which I’m not even going to refer to, but I can’t believe they turn into a joke, to do with a local sheriff (Stavros Halkias). But he is a terrible human being who does terrible stuff like kidnap and torture people, whose beliefs in no way justify any of his actions.
As to what the “truth” is, well, what is truth anyway? Subjective, objective, whatever it is, the phrase about a stopped clocks being right twice a day or the sun shining on a dog’s arse eventually maybe come to mind, but I’m not going to spoil the resolution of this mildly amusing, mildly diverting flick. Ninety per cent of it is Teddy and the CEO arguing, and considering what strong actors they both are, that’s entertaining in and of itself. She goes from giving calm denials to loud, declarative rejections of Teddy’s obviously flawed premises, to embracing Teddy’s bullshit and saying “sure, I’m a space Empress, do what I say”, and back again all over the place before there are any revelations at film’s end.
If anyone has seen the South Korean flick this was based on, being Save the Green Planet! from 2003, then they know how the story plays out and what happens in the end. Anyone that hasn’t may be left with their mouth agape at what they do at the end of this flick. Is it a cheap and nasty ironic ending, or is it a deeply felt, elegiac sequence of tableaus that simultaneously celebrates and laments human life’s tenure on this planet?
Take yer pick. This feels like the least Yorgos Lanthimos-like of all of Yorgos Lanthimos’s films, in that while it’s in no way a nice neat conventional story, it doesn’t have his signature awkwardness of performances regardless of the subject matter, which gets pretty horrific at certain points. This feels almost like a director-for-hire kind of gig, especially when you compare it to his last two flicks, being Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness, which are nothing if not bonkers and awkwardly acted. Some might think a lack of his usual affectations and indulgences would be to the film’s benefit, but hey, maybe that’s what we watch his flicks for.
Along again for the ride is Jerskin Fendrix, composing the score and delivering another unsettling, abrasive experience to offend us on an auditory level if the visuals aren’t doing their work, which they often are. Stone is solid, as always, in the Jerry Lewis role (which would make Teddy Rupert Pupkin from King of Comedy), but the one thing she never does, which I guess is keeping within character, is look scared.
And yet she is not the flick’s heroine. No-one comes out of this looking good, and maybe that’s how it should be. Bugonia is a minor flick in a minor key, and that’s all it needed to be.
6 times I haven’t taken the time to do my own research out of 10
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“You can’t beat me because I’m a winner and you’re a loser and that’s fucking life!” – you’re a motivational speaker as well? - Bugonia
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