“Bugonia” has arrived.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest descent into the unknown is a prickly remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s cult classic “Save the Green Planet” from 2003, about a pair of mentally unwell conspiracy theorists (Jesse Plemons and newcomer Aidan Delbis) who kidnap a CEO (Emma Stone), convinced she’s an alien invader. Over the entire movie, an unsettling question looms: is there a chance these nitwits are actually right?
We spoke to “Bugonia” screenwriter Will Tracy, who also wrote the similarly uneasy culinary horror movie “The Menu,” about the movie’s conclusion in order to answer some of your biggest questions.
Consider this the biggest possible spoiler warning we could issue. If you haven’t seen “Bugonia,” turn back now. This article will still be here, waiting for you when you get back.
So, is she an alien?
Yes.
Really?
Yes.
Go on.
Towards the end of the movie, Emma Stone’s captured CEO Michelle Fuller escapes from her captivity and goes through a small crawl space – it’s there that she witnesses just how far her captors have gone. She is not the first CEO. They have kidnapped and murdered several others; she sees body parts and corpses, along with drawings of her supposed spaceship and other technological jargon. She knows she’s got to get out of here.
She and Plemons end up going to her office. He’s strapped dynamite around himself and they retreat into her space. She tells him that her closet is the transport chamber for her spaceship and when he gets in, he accidentally blows himself up (it’s quite gory).
As the ambulance is taking her away, she makes them stop. She runs out, back into her office and gets into her closet – it really was a teleportation device. She really was an alien. And now she’s back in her spaceship, with her kind. Yes, the spaceship looks exactly like Plemons’ drawings.
How different is the “Bugonia” ending to the “Save the Green Planet” ending?
They’re pretty similar, so if you’ve seen the original, you know where all of this is going.
Was the ending ever considered to be something else?
We posed this question to Tracy.
“I always stuck to that and the ending. I always also stuck to that ending that I had of those scenes on Earth that you see at the very end. Those tableau from around the world – that always felt the most interesting to me,” Tracy said (more on those tableaus in a minute). “Weirdly, I didn’t even think of it while I was writing in terms of like, oh, it’s all building up to the twist. Or, how do I preserve the twist or hide the football? I was really just focused on those two characters and their emotional arcs and so and that just seemed like it had to go that way.”
What about those tableaus?
At the very end of the movie, Emma Stone and her fellow aliens decide that Earth had a good run but now humanity has to end. This is symbolized by her popping a “bubble” around Earth (which is, of course, flat). We’ve seen this Earth during interstitial chapter breaks, but now we know what it really means – it’s their version of the planet, in a little dish on their ship.
At the very end, we see people and places that we’d seen earlier in the movie, but now everybody is dead. But fret not – the animals are still alive!
“I think we want to have a vision of what the world would be like without people. But then also, we’re still seeing a world with people – they’re dead, but we’re seeing in those tableau of those people, in those positions, we kind of see a little panoply of the human experience and what we’d be missing, all the idiosyncrasies and humor and oddness and also some bad things and some good things and that sense of what we’d be missing,” Tracy explained. “It makes one aware of what would be lost.”
What about the very last shot?
The last shot is of a bee pollinating a flower. You can read into that all you want – the relationship between two species, the way they create life instead of destroying it – but there is also a more practical reason for the final shot. It mirrors the first shot of the movie. According to Tracy, that was there all along.
“Because the movie begins and ends with the flower and the bee and it had that circular thing all along,” he said.
“Bugonia” is in theaters now.
