Okja Review
Bong Joon Ho reminds us of the power of CGI done right in his heartfelt takedown of the meat industry
With Okja, director Bong Joon Ho has created something remarkable and, sadly, increasingly rare: a film with something to say that remembers to entertain us throughout. For all its disturbing imagery and unapologetic attack on meat slaughter, Okja never loses its grasp on the love at the centre of this story. Balancing friendship, loyalty, drama, comedy, horror and politics is no easy task but Bong proves he is more than up to the task. All the talk about its Netflix distribution model threatens to distract us from the simple fact that Okja is a wonderful picture. That it’s so readily available only increases the chance of people watching it. And it’s important that they do.
Okja is a super-pig. One of 26 super-pigs “discovered” by the Mirando corporation and given to accomplished farmers across the world. These pigs are to be raised and, after ten years, returned back to the United States and their Mirando parents to be cut, sliced and minced and delivered to the public (this is why it is, of course, most important that they be “fucking delicious”). The Mirando corporation presents this new livestock as the future of produce and a solution to world hunger. This may seem like quite a bit of information to get across to audiences and you may wonder how a filmmaker would best approach delivering this exposition. Bong Joon Ho’s answer is quite simple: have Tilda Swinton explain it to us. Okja opens with a flashback where Swinton’s Lucy Mirando is delivering a presentation on her exciting super-pig project. Usually this kind of verbal exposition dump would be a faux pas, but in the hands of an accomplished director like Bong, it proves to be right choice. By immediately getting the necessary information out of the way, Okja is free to spend time developing its real focus; something which it does with aplomb.
We are taken forward ten years, to a South Korean rainforest where a teenaged girl spends her days playing with her best friend — a giant hippo-like pig named Okja. In the shade of the trees, Mija (An Seo Hyun) sleeps atop her porcine pal. When Okja rolls onto her back, Mija rolls to counter Okja’s movement and ends up lying comfortably on her friend’s soft stomach. Here are two friends totally in sync with one another. The entire opening act of the film plays out almost wordlessly and any initial fear that Bong would rely too heavily on expository dialogue is immediately quelled. When Mija finds herself in mortal danger, Okja’s response to the situation reveals an empathetic creature with far more intelligence than your average swine. The bond between the two is immediately clear and so we share Mija’s bitter disappointment when she learns that her guardian Hee Bong (Byun Heebong) failed in his attempt to purchase Okja from Mirando. Okja has been selected as the company’s prize super-pig and they have come to reclaim her so she can be brought to New York in time for a PR show. Mija refuses to accept this and takes after Okja, determined to rescue her and bring her back to the mountains — back to her home. Throughout the film, Mija never loses sight of her goal and regardless of the distance separating them, she is always fighting by Okja’s side.
Mija’s journey takes her from the mountains of South Korea to the centre of Seoul where she runs into the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a decidedly non-violent activist group, led by Paul Dano’s Jay, who plan to steal Okja, fit her with secret cameras and return her to the Mirando Group whereupon she can help them expose the corporation’s abuses to animal rights. The ALF are introduced amidst an exhilarating chase through the streets of Seoul that really show off Bong Joon Ho’s pedigree as a visual director. A beautifully shot and edited sequence, we are drawn in to the action while never losing track of what’s happening. The tight corridors and packed shop-floors of an underground shopping centre also provides the perfect environment to appreciate the wonderful work of the visual effects team. Despite being a huge CGI pig, Okja always feels like a physical presence on screen. Her movements are realistic and her emotive eyes endear her to us. She is a character every bit as much as her human counterparts.
The further Okja gets from her home in the Korean mountains, the further Bong takes us from the peaceful, sun soaked first act. Once we reach the States, the soft green tint of the rainforest is replaced by clinical white corporate boardrooms and densely packed parades, which only give way to harrowing scenes of a slaughterhouse, fittingly shot in the dark with nothing but harsh, artificial lighting. Subtle the message is not, but Bong never allows the film to veer into the territory of vegan propaganda and his focus on entertaining first is admirable. It’s not too difficult to find humour in a giant genetically-modified pig running rampant through the streets of Seoul, but to maintain that humour while juxtaposing it against the disturbing imagery of innocent, emotionally complex animals meeting their end purely for the purpose of corporate gain is quite a remarkable achievement. This is not simply an attack on the idea of meat eating, but rather on the duplicitous, under-handed practices of corporate America. Tilda Swinton plays not just the publicly agreeable Lucy, but also her far more cynical twin sister Nancy and together they symbolically represent both the smiling face and underlying self-serving intentions of a money-obsessed capitalist regime.
Bong Joon Ho set out to achieve a lot of things with Okja and, remarkably, succeeds in achieving all of them. The film certainly isn’t perfect — it drags in moments and Jake Gyllanhaal’s appearance as TV-zoologist Dr Johnny Wilcox is so over-done as to be painful at times — but Bong has created a film that typifies what food sci-fi should be. It is engaging, dramatic and funny throughout and none of this gets in the way of it being genuinely thought provoking. Bong reminds us that the screen needn’t be filled with gratuitous CGI. A little restraint can go a long way and Okja serves to show us why how effective CGI can be. Despite being about an over-sized GM super-pig, the film’s focus on Mija and Okja’s unbreakable love grounds this as an undeniably human story. This is true populist cinema and it’s all the better for it. We appreciate it because it has a head, but we love it because it has a heart.
