okja (joon-ho bong, 2017)
Wednesday, July 12, 2017
Okja is the fifth movie by Joon-Ho Bong that I have seen. I've been impressed by all of them ... even as his films test different genres, there is a consistency to the quality of his work. As I wrote of Memories of Murder:
Thus far, Bong has demonstrated the ability to make very good movies, but for some reason, I wouldn’t put any of them in the “great” range just yet. He’s got time, of course, and he has yet to make a stinker. Even his American movie was good (Snowpiercer). Bong is reliably consistent, even though there is no telling what he’ll come up with next.
If there's a problem with this consistency, it's that I am running out of things to say. But I was also prescient ... there is no telling what he'll do next, and Okja is a perfect example. Like Snowpiercer, Okja is an American movie. Unlike Snowpiercer, a significant amount of the film is in Korean. Snowpiercer was a futuristic sci-fi dystopia; The Host was a monster movie; Memories was a procedural. And now Okja, an anti-corporation tale where the title character is a genetically-modified "super pig" and the main human character is a young Korean girl (played by Ahn Seo-hyun). It's a bit like a live-action Miyazaki movie, except with cussing and some brutal slaughterhouse scenes.
The cast is interesting, with Steven Yeun from The Walking Dead, Paul Dano, Lily Collins, and Devon Bostick from The 100 as a group of animal-rights activists. Giancarlo Esposito is a bad guy, and Tilda Swinton (who was also in Snowpiercer) plays twin sisters. Swinton manages to chew the scenery while somehow being subtle about it, although this may just be her ethereal look, the way she seems magnificently odd.
I mention this because the worst part of Okja comes from Jake Gyllenhaal, whose overacting takes over the movie whenever he's on the screen. Gyllenhaal has been fine in many films, and I'm not sure what has prompted this performance, which is as if Ace Ventura popped in for a lengthy cameo. In such cases, my tendency is to blame the director. Gyllenhaal doesn't make Okja unwatchable ... I'm exaggerating his awfulness, and he is not the main character. But he, as much as anything, contributes to Okja being yet another Bong movie that is very good, but not great.
Bong is one the best living directors, and he's only 47. To quote myself, he's got time, and he has yet to make a stinker. 8/10.
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