Okja

Year 13, Day 2 - 1/2/21 - Movie #3,702

BEFORE: Don't worry, I haven't gone completely Korean with my choices this year - this film on Netflix is from the same director as "Parasite", Bong Joon Ho, and it features a mix of Korean and American/UK actors, so this is necessary to get from last year's Oscar-winner back to regular Hollywood films.  Then of course I've got a lot of Swedish material - both old and new - coming up in January, so I suppose I am going a little multi-culti this month.  Then what's going to happen after February?  I really have no idea.  

As with the pandemic news, I can only see about a month or two into the future, and so we keep saying "Things will get better in a month or two..." or "Just another two months of lockdown, and then maybe the restaurants and movie theaters can re-open..."  Yeah, we've been saying that for 10 months now.  

But I've been dealing with a sudden influx of new films, on all the streaming services - of course, now that my schedule is set until March, that's when everything will come flooding in, right?  Major films that were supposed to be 2020 tentpoles all got pushed to 2021, like "Black Widow" and "No Time to Die".  But other films like "Mulan" and "Bill and Ted Face the Music" went straight to premium On Demand or streaming services.  Some films have opted for a split-release, like "Wonder Woman 1984" becoming available in theaters and on HBO Max at the same time.  And the top-grossing film of 2020 in theaters was "Bad Boys for Life", which made about one-quarter the box office of 2019's top-grosser, "Avengers: Endgame".  So it's a different world now, and we're waiting to see what effect this will have on the Oscars, which for the first time will allow films that premiered on cable or streaming to be award-eligible.  How will this change the process, will there be fewer films to nominate, or perhaps more?  All bets seem to be off right now - if some people thought "Parasite" was a dark-horse winner, maybe they haven't seen anything yet.  People are buzzing about "Mank", "Tenet", "Da 5 Bloods" and other films like "Nomadland" and "I'm Thinking of Ending Things", and I've seen none of those.  I've also lost my Academy screeners connection, so I'm just going to have to muddle through and keep on doing what I do.

Choi Woo-Shik carries over from "Parasite", and so does the voice of Lee Jeong-eun, according to the IMDB.  

THE PLOT: A young girl risks everything to prevent a powerful, multinational company from kidnapping her best friend - a fascinating beast named Okja.  

AFTER: Well, it seems like I've completed my Year of Weird Movies, only the Weird Movies are not done with me yet.  This is a strange film on so many levels, how could it not be, when it's about a new type of animal that doesn't exist in real life?  So perhaps this whole thing is supposed to be taken not literally but as a metaphor for man's relationship with the animal kingdom, which is a complicated one at best.  We've "decided" as a bunch of omnivores that some animals are for eating and others are better as pets, but different societies have different rules about, say, horses and dogs.  Horses have been working for humans for a couple thousand years, and some societies would never eat horses, but some other countries don't seem to mind.  And we Americans are shocked if we learn that another country eats dog meat, but isn't that all rather arbitrary?  Did we sign some deal with the leader of the dogs where as long as dogs help humans hunt and play with their kids and keep their feet warm at night, we won't eat them?  What makes dogs exempt from being bred for meat like chickens, turkeys, cows and pigs?  

There are many different people in the world, and therefore many opinions on this whole meat-eating thing.  As humans we like to think that we're "top of the food chain", but is that really true?  Aren't there plenty of animals out there, like sharks, crocodiles, bears and wolves that would love to eat people, given the chance?  Or do we win by default because we're the only species that keeps large numbers of animals in captivity, allowing so many cows and pigs to be born JUST to serve as food?  By comparison, a case could be made for eating horses just because it's more efficient - the horses serve a function their whole life as a riding animal, and then serve a second function as food when they're no longer useful?  Isn't it therefore a waste that we don't have another use for pigs and cows - oh wait, cows give us milk and then when they can't do that any more, I guess we eat them.  Come to think of it, it all seems very barbaric - though I guess I've seen people who live on farms who get to know the cows and the pigs, who then might feel a little funny about eating them later.  

I've believed for many years that the Earth is terribly over-populated, we're going to run out of everything at some point, and then where will we be?  There's no back-up Earth, and if we should accidentally eat the last cow or chicken then that's it, we'll have to figure something else out or start eating each other.  And we KNOW this deep down, only nobody's taking any steps to ensure this doesn't happen.  China tried that whole one-child-per-family thing, and I think they meant well, but it was seen as a form of oppression and the whole policy was eventually scrapped.  But why wasn't this seen as a step in the right direction, just because some people didn't like it?  Because it took away the personal freedom to have 10 kids and not be able to provide for them all?  If you ask me, that policy was doing the average citizen a favor, preventing anyone from having too large a family to be able to support financially.  

In the same way, deep down we KNOW that the climate change warnings are real, and that some of the vegetarian factions probably have a good point.  People now talk about "sustainable" farming, processes that give back to the land instead of just taking from it, and decades ago that would have been unheard of - what, tear down a forest and then also replace it?  Back then, that would have sounded like madness, not progress - you tear down a forest, use its resources, eat its animals and then build a strip-mall there or something.  But slowly we realize we're running out of forests, we're running out of land, and eventually we're going to run out of delicious animals, too.  Instead of changing human behavior though, we're starting to seek out "impossible" meats that were grown in a lab, and trying to make them taste just like the real thing.  Umm, I guess that's a way to go, only it won't really show progress until the older generation that still likes to hunt and insists on eating real meat all dies off.  

We all draw that line in a different place, as our consciences dictate - like if I didn't kill the animal myself, I don't feel all that guilty about being an omnivore, I just went to the store and bought the meat, and my soul feels relatively clear.  I eat veggie burgers a few times a month, honestly they don't taste great unless I put some interesting cheese and/or BBQ sauce on them, but I'm trying.  I also favor cold cuts like head cheese and other products like spam, made from scraps, and I hope that's being helpful in using every part of the animals that have already been sacrificed?  No?  I'm trying to eat more vegetables and rice, too.  

This film posits a different solution, as a large conglomerate invents a new animal, a sort of "super-pig" that is much larger, and also somehow friendlier and more intelligent, and a pilot program is started around the world to have the first 26 of them raised by farmers in different countries, in some kind of arbitrary competition over 10 years to raise the "best" one.  There are a few things wrong with this premise, starting with - why 10 years?  If the world needs more meat-based solutions NOW, why take ten years to make the new animal's meat available?  Secondly, if the new pig is larger, won't it require more food, more water, to reach its ideal food-producing weight, and how does that solve the problem, instead of making it worse?  

Of course, it's part of a con by Big Farma - the CEO of the Mirando Corporation swears this animal is non-GMO, not a genetically modified organism.  But, NITPICK POINT here, why does everyone take her at her word on this, when she's clearly bending the truth?  You can't just snap your fingers and create a new animal, not overnight, and not in 10 years either.  The only way to create a new species, beyond being God, is to meddle with the DNA, and therefore that's a GMO.  Every single sub-species of dog is a GMO, only humans created all the dog breeds over hundreds of years, by mating dogs with similar characteristics, enhancing the traits needed to allow dachshunds to hunt badgers (this is true) or bulldogs to pin bulls to the ground (also true).  Ask yourself why any dog looks the way it does, then dig into history and find out what it was that humans needed it to do for them.  OK, I guess this is why we don't eat dogs...

The good (?) news is that we have fish farms now, and oyster farms - pisciculture/aquaculture - so even if we take all the fish out of the oceans, we can still keep eating seafood, and that's apparently sustainable.  Maybe if we keep coming up with solutions like this, we'll be OK - but still have to address the problems of climate change and overpopulation, if not there may be more "corrective" occurrences like pandemics that may keep humans from destroying everything on spaceship Earth.  

The Mirando CEO (played by an unusually subtle Tilda Swinton, in contrast to Jake Gyllenhaal's over-the-top zoologist Dr. Johnny Wilcox) also says right off the bat, that this super-pig better taste f-ing delicious.  There's no mistaking that this animal was bred from the start to be eaten, so why is everyone so surprised that there are acres and acres of them, with a slaughterhouse nearby?  NITPICK POINT #2, hasn't everyone known for 10 years that there's a new animal coming, and therefore a new meat?  Haven't there been commercials for "New Pork, coming soon from Mirando"?  And then even at the rollout parade there are delicious new meat-sticks being handed out, doesn't anybody know what's happening?  Why is it such a shock that they've started killing the new super-pigs?  I don't get it, everybody should have been aware.  

All I could think about was the joke about the pig with the wooden leg - while visiting a farm, a woman notices a pig with a wooden leg, so she asks the farmer about it.  The farmer says, "Well, a wild bear attacked while I was feeding the pigs, and that pig ran over and attacked the bear, chased it away and saved my life!" The woman says, "Ah,  but the bear bit off the pig's leg?"  "Naw, the pig was fine, but later on there was a fire in the barn, that pig broke out of the barn, came into the house and started squealing, woke up my whole family, and we ran out and put out the fire, while the pig herded the other animals to safety..." "Ah, so that's when the pig hurt his leg?"  "Nope, but after that my tractor hit a rock and I fell off, knocked unconscious - but before the tractor could run me over, the pig came and pulled me to safety..."  "But that's when the tractor ran over the pig's leg?"  "Nope, he was fine after that."  "So tell me, how did the pig lose his leg?"  "Well," the farmer says, "a pig that special, you don't want to eat him all at once!" 

Mija, the little Korean girl who spends ten years helping to raise Okja, I guess also never got the memo about what happens to animals on a farm.  Is this believable?  Or is she just another one of those idealistic young people who thinks they can change the world?  Or, like everyone else, is she only thinking about her own needs and her love for Okja?  I suppose this is a debatable point.  In her quest to reunite with Okja, Mija hooks up with the Animal Liberation Front, but she doesn't always seem to share the same goals with them.  That organization exists to disrupt the economies of companies that profit from the abuse of animals.  Perhaps one day Mija could be an activist like Greta Thunberg, only she doesn't seem interested here in becoming that.  Like most of us, she may be thinking of her own needs first and unable to see the big picture.  I fear that most of us are also unable or unwilling to see the world through a macro-scope, to realize that small actions and small changes can have big implications.  

Unfortunately, without proper guidance from government sources, look what's gone on in just the last few years.  People can't agree on whether it's better to fight climate change or just ignore it, whether it's better to take vaccines or get sick intentionally to develop herd immunity, and there's a large percentage of the U.S. population that doesn't believe we just had a fair election.  There's so much disinformation floating around about how much trouble we are (or aren't) in, I'm not surprised that the average person doesn't realize how much of a pickle we're in, and most people therefore probably won't, not until it's too late. 

I think "Okja" might help change some minds, but its message was itself very murky, offering no clear solutions, not even a real take-down of the meat industry until the very conclusion of the film.  Perhaps if it had tried to do more than it did nobody would have paid attention, but I guess that's the chance you take when you try to use art to enact social change.  

NITPICK POINT: the word "local" is the latest one to have lost nearly all of its meaning.  The pigs will be raised by "local" farmers - aren't all farmers local?  They're all located somewhere, right?  In this difficult time, you can help support "local" restaurants - again, all restaurants are local to WHERE THEY ARE.  If you mean "non-chain" or "individually-owned" restaurants, then say that instead.  Just saying. 

Also starring Ahn Seo-hyun, Tilda Swinton (last seen in "Suspiria"), Paul Dano (last seen in "Swiss Army Man"), Jake Gyllenhaal (last seen in "Velvet Buzzsaw"), Byun Hee-bong, Steven Yeun (last seen in "Sorry to Bother You"), Giancarlo Esposito (last seen in "Desperately Seeking Susan"), Lily Collins (last seen in "The Blind Side"), Yoon Je-moon, Shirley Henderson (last seen in "Greed"), Daniel Henshall (last seen in "Ghost in the Shell"), Devon Bostick (last seen in "The Art of the Steal"), Waris Ahluwalia (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 persimmons