K-SCORE: 50
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Writer: Bong Joon-ho, Jon Ronson
Starring: Ahn Seo-hyun, Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Lily Collins, Steven Yeun
Spoiler Level: Minor
Okja has a very intense conflict. A little Korean girl from the mountains of South Korea whose parents died when she was young grows up alongside a genetically enhanced giant pig named Okja. The creature is very intelligent and loving and is the girl’s best friend. A corporation comes to take the pig away, first to use it as a show pig to demonstrate the success of their breeding program and then to slaughter it for pork. Since the emotional stakes are so high, especially for me, a person with a rather strong attachment to an animal and animals in general, delivering a satisfying and potentially uplifting story shouldn’t be too challenging. Yet Okja botches it because it gets distracted by ancillary characters that are cartoony and a tone that shifts from scene to scene, moment to moment.
Though the Korean girl and the CGI animators that brought Okja to life do a great job of captivating you with their loving relationship, Paul Dano, Jake Gylenhaal, and Tilda Swinton all deliver wretched performances. It’s as if each of them mistakenly believes the film is about their character when it is not. None of their characters develop or come to any resolution. (Granted I hoped each character would simply die horribly, but even if they didn’t go that route they could go some route.) Yet whenever these actors are on the screen, they’re doing something outrageous that pulls focus without being funny, entertaining, or impactful. I don’t care that Lucy Mirando has a feud with her sister or that her father was a bad man as was told to me four times. I don’t care how Jay handles disagreements within the Animal Liberation Front. And I really don’t care about an unrealistic, screamed monologue about the declining popularity of reality television actor Johnny Wilcox. Not only are these characters poorly performed, their very conception is somehow off, with entirely too much time spent on them and others like the weird Korean truck driver and the mousy personal assistant.
Netflix seems to have given full creative freedom to the writer/director, which I’m totally in support of, but that only means Bong Joon-ho bears the brunt of responsibility for his film’s mediocrity. A good example of why and how Okja is less than it could be is in a conference room scene after the mid-climactic chase through the streets of Seoul. Following the best work they do, where Mija is a heat-seeking missile honed-in on the one being she cares about, Bong Joon-ho spends an outrageous ten minutes, fully a twelfth the total script, having characters walking around complaining about the PR problems of the chase and explaining future events that we could have just witnessed had they got around to showing them. He needed an editor, or a better one if he had one. Okja needs focus. It misses an opportunity to tell both a special feel-good story about a young girl fighting to keep her big piggy friend and a meaningful story about the lives we cherish and the ones we take away so we can continue to eat. It misses because the adult performers and writer thought maybe they could add a few ounces of Wes Anderson here and there.