Not The Amazing Anti-Meat Argument One Might Hope For: Okja Reminds Us To Not Name Our Steaks.

The Good: Decent CG effects, Seo-Hyun Ahn acts like a pro opposite the effects, Generally good acting
The Bad: Painfully obvious themes, Simplistic plot, Unlikable characters
The Basics: Okja painfully blurs the lines between making a statement on the condition of the meat processing industry, animal rights activism, and the perils of making a food animal into a pet.


When it comes to Netflix Original Films, there have been none that have had the press momentum prior to their release like Okja. Okja, streaming today, has one of the most acclaimed casts yet for a Netflix film - Tilda Swinton, Giancarlo Esposito, and Jake Gyllenhaal being the most recognizable to American audiences - and was originally debuted at the Cannes Film Festival where it garnered a lot of positive press. Before sitting down to Okja, all I knew about the film was that Steven Yeun of The Walking Dead was in the movie and my wife warned me that, having recently lost our beloved Siberian Husky Myah, the film might be a little depressing for me.

Okja is the latest film in a fairly recent trend of movies that try to expose the conditions under which our food is made. Unlike something like Fast Food Nation (reviewed here!), which focuses on the United States and casts a wide net over the industry, Okja tells a far more intimate story. Okja almost instantly illustrates why most of us have different animals for food than we do for pets.

Opening in 2007, in New York City, Lucy Mirando takes over the powerful multinational Mirando company. Under her leadership, the new super pig that was born and reproduced in one of her holdings is being developed for future consumption. The twenty-five super pigs are shipped to different parts of the world for a ten-year competition to see which one will grow into the largest and most delicious super pig in the world. Ten years later in Korea, Mija lives with her grandfather in the hills, spending her days running around playing with her massive super pig, Okja. With the competition rushing to a close, Mija's grandfather lies to her and tells her he has bought Okja, but when a film crew comes to their home to see Okja, the truth comes comes out and Okja is taken away.

With Okja having been abducted to Seoul before her journey to New York City for the final portion of the competition, Mija runs away from home to rescue her beloved companion. Mija makes it to the Mirando offices in Seoul just in time to see Okja being taken away by truck. Mija manages to run and jump onto the truck transporting Okja, when animal rights activists smash into the truck and Okja is freed. Okja runs through Seoul wreaking havoc before she and Mija are rescued by the Animal Liberation Front activists. The leader of the ALF, Jay, tells Mija about the truth about Mirando's laboratories and he tells her that the ALF's plan is to use Okja as a spy in Mirando's laboratories. K, however, lies to Mija and Okja is taken to New York with the spy technology needed to expose Mirando.

Okja is being hailed as a masterpiece of animal rights, with viewers lauding it for illustrating just how horribly we treat animals in the food processing industry. Okja does not actually do that with any effectiveness. Instead, it simply makes painfully explicit why most people do not raise pets for food. There is a disconnect between food and pets; most people wouldn't eat meat if they got to know their food animals in advance of their slaughter. So, while Okja is being hailed as brilliant and a masterpiece, it plays out much more like a "simple problem, simple solution." In today's society, in our modern world, if one ants to be able to enjoy a hamburger, it helps not to spend time on the killing floor of a slaughter house. It is easy enough to avoid the entire thematic conflict presented in Okja.

Okja takes the stance that using animals for food is inherently and entirely wrong. For sure, in the real world, the meat industry is problematically regulated and slaughterhouse conditions are not ideal for humans or the animals slaughtered there. The Animal Liberation Front takes an extreme view about animal rights and when Jay details the ALF agenda, it is hard to take him seriously as a reliable narrator. Okja does not satisfactorily explain how the ALF got reliable intelligence on the Mirando Corporation, so it is easy to write off Jay's claims initially as the crackpot theories of extremists.

Lucy Mirando certainly appears - in closed-door meetings - as fairly idealistic and ethical, which helps to undermine the idea that Jay is a credible narrator. Lucy is clearly being manipulated by the more corporately-inclined Dawson, but for much of the film, Lucy is not presented as an actual or credible villain.

The performances in Okja are all good. Jake Gyllenhaal is virtually unrecognizable as the Mirando media presence, Johnny Wilcox. Paul Dano, Lily Collins and Steven Yeun are all credible in their intense performances of animal rights activists. All of the animal rights activist performers are great in their reaction shots throughout Okja. Tilda Swinton is her usual wonderful self as Lucy Mirando. Swinton gives viewers something new at the film's climax where she does a spot-on Jane Lynch impersonation. Shirley Henderson seems to be playing the same type character she did on Doctor Who and Harry Potter and Seo-Hyun Ahn does fine playing a little girl in love with her pet.

The direction in Okja is good.

Unfortunately, in addition to having a simple conflict with a simple solution, Okja is riddled with continuity problems. Most significant is that during the ALF's abduction of Okja, Jay has to speak through Kay for Mija to understand. Mija does not understand English initially, so Kay translates. But much of the scene has Jay speaking without Kay translating any to Mija. In a similar fashion, the suspension of disbelief in Okja is strained beyond the breaking point when Johnny Wilcox has access to the breeding area and behind-the-scenes laboratory area of the Mirando Corporation. That's simply not a location a figurehead or public face for the company would traditionally have access to and the scene - while monstrous - stands out as troubling in an unrealistic way.

Ultimately, Okja is a new presentation of the same arguments Fast Food Nation made a decade ago, that Vegans make every day and that omnivores with a strong "ignorance is bliss" lifestyle maintain in order to enjoy their burgers, chicken nuggets, and dolphin-safe tuna. And yes, I get it, humans are terrible. But so is Okja.

For other Netflix exclusive films, please check out my reviews of:
Shimmer Lake
War Machine
Girlfriend's Day
Take The 10
Clinical
Barry
Spectral
True Memoirs Of An International Assassin
I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House
Mascots
ARQ
XOXO
Tallulah
Special Correspondents
The Fundamentals Of Caring
The Ridiculous 6

3/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Film Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2017 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Class Warfare In The Face Of Human Extinction: Why Snowpiercer Is Worth Watching!

The Good: Interesting plot, Great effects (costume design, sets, make-up), Engaging characters
The Bad: Suspension of disbelief issues, I’m not wild about the shaky-cam stuff.
The Basics: In a dark, but not unpleasant-to-watch, story of human rebellion, Snowpiercer chronicles a future freedom fight that pits poor people on a train against their elitist oppressors.


We are finally to a point where the vast majority of the world acknowledges the real and growing dangers presented by global warming in the Earth’s climate, so (arguably) the last thing we need to fuel the remaining naysayers is a film that illustrates catastrophic consequences of trying to fix that problem. And yet, the new film Snowpiercer seeks to do just that. The initial premise is a simple one: after a multinational endeavor to turn back the tide of global warming releases a developed agent, CW-7, into the Earth’s atmosphere, all life on Earth is wiped out when the result is essentially a new ice age. The survivors live on a single train and that allows director Joon-ho Bong and co-writer Kelly Masterson to tell a dark story of futuristic human oppression without all of the complications of the full, real, world in play.

And Snowpiercer uses the set-up to tell a story that is essentially a class warfare allegory. The sense of oppression among the lowest class of survivors on the train has reached a peak and the revolution has come. The result is a film that is realistic in its approach to the violent overthrow of an overbearing regime. Snowpiercer is well-constructed in that it works hard to develop the concept that human survival is not enough; the human spirit must be allowed to flourish and systems of control that diminish some and elevate others are untenable, even among the last dwindling population on the planet. It is worth noting that Snowpiercer is based upon a series of graphic novels that I have not read. As a result, this is a very pure review of the film Snowpiercer, unencumbered by any preconceptions about the graphic novel or how it was adapted to film.

Seventeen years after CW-7 is dispersed through Earth’s upper atmosphere, the human population that survived the attempt to reverse global warming’s effects live on the Rattling Ark, a train that has been moving since the world outside froze. Aboard the train, Curtis resists the totalitarian forces that tote guns and do daily head counts of each compartment. Curtis and Edgar get a message (embedded in a protein block) that there is a security expert, Namgoong Minsu, in the prison car and Curtis believes that if they can get to the front of the train and take the engine, they can run the train. Curtis wants to revolt and install Gilliam as the new leader of the train (and thus, the world), though the very old Gilliam is resistant to the idea. Edgar thinks Curtis would be a good leader, but he is resistant to the idea. So, a plan is hatched that hinges on four gates (quite a distance apart) being opened at the same time for four seconds, which might allow Curtis to break Namgoong out of the prison car.

With luck (and the oppressors not having bullets) on their side, Curtis manages to stage a break-in to the prison car. There, he and his group of malcontents find Namgoong and break him and his daughter Yona out of prison. In exchange for drugs, Namgoong agrees to help Curtis and his group through the gates that separate the train’s cars and soon Curtis is leading a bona fide revolution. But that revolution soon comes at a high cost; traveling into the more wealthy and elite sections of the train, Curtis encounters Minister Mason, the leader of the train’s military, and rich folks who will kill to defend their position, like the teacher in the school train. As Curtis loses friends and allies, he takes drastic measures to reach the engine which might make him into the leader, but not necessarily the one Edgar foresaw him becoming.

First and foremost, Snowpiercer looks completely credible. Those drawn to the Captain America film franchise because of Chris Evans’s clean-cut good looks will be shocked to see just how filthy he can look. Throughout Snowpiercer, Evans (who leads the cast as Curtis) and everyone else is covered in a thin sheen of dirt and sweat. Everything in the movie is dirty and aged, looking stressed and worn (save the firearms carried by the officers aboard the train). That creates an instantly believable atmosphere and the perception that nothing new has been made in seventeen years. It also makes one wonder immediately what exactly the protein blocks are that everyone is consuming. The contrast with the cleanliness and color palate in the forward sections is striking and it makes for a visually interesting movie, even if it is a bit obvious.

The film’s mood is also established right away by the seemingly random question all of the inhabitants of the car Curtis is in are asked. Military thugs with heavy guns ask if anyone in the car knows how to play violin. When one man mentions that he and his wife both play and he is carted off (without his wife) because they “need his hands,” there is an underlying sense of menace to the exchange that helps instantly encapsulate the dark world that Earth aboard the Rattling Ark has become.

Snowpiercer smartly develops as Curtis and his rebels move forward in the train, encountering different social groups in each compartment. The film is like a mini-Gulliver’s Travels in that each train car is like an almost entirely different world. The social commentary abounds and Snowpiercer does with more success and subtlety what Elysium (reviewed here!) tried to do with its thematic bludgeon; it shows all the horror of class division in a world of diminished resources.

The film would be an unfortunate failure were it not for the intriguing characters. Curtis is an intense man who is easy to watch and him asking Edgar early in the film about his earliest memories sets up the film’s late and horrifying revelations. Gilliam is an interesting, if tragic, mentor and Edgar’s part in the story is enough to give reasonable cause to the revolution; he is a young person who wants a better life than the one he is given by those in power. Even Wilford, the leader Curtis must ultimately confront, makes some sense in the context of the one-train world.

Despite the characters being easy to watch, not all of Snowpiercer is enjoyable in its presentation. Many of the fight sequences utilize handheld cameras, so they are shaky and frenetic. Given that the fights themselves are already packed with motion, moving the camera during them just becomes nauseating. Moreover, much of the actual fight to get to the front of the train is a bloodbath and the high cost (in human lives) is difficult to watch. I mark that as a success of Snowpiercer as the viewer actually cares as various people are killed in each confrontation. What could be a truly monstrous revelation about the backstory, which comes very late in the film, is hinted at enough throughout the movie and follows on the heels of explicit violence as to make it seem more obvious than truly troubling.

The acting in Snowpiercer is good. Chris Evans rises to the occasion of being the troubled antihero who rallies the masses to his side even as his character hides a deep, dark secret from his past. Evans plays Curtis without much charisma, which sells the concept of Curtis being relegated to one of the back cars well. Jamie Bell (Edgar), John Hurt (Gilliam), and Octavia Spencer (Tanya) credibly round out the caste of oppressed characters with Bell contributing a wide-eyed sense of optimism that serves his character well. Tilda Swinton plays Minister Mason with an appropriately stern demeanor that does not hint at all at the way she played the villain in The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe (reviewed here!). Unfortunately, at the other end of the spectrum, Alison Pill is underused as the teacher (her clean cheerfulness is used largely to offset her character’s quick and bloody turn) and Ed Harris’s Wilford quickly turns into a mouthpiece for excessive exposition. Kang-ho Song plays Namgoong with enough of an off-balance sense to sell the drug addict and the engineer in him, though his best moments are when he struggles to protect his character’s daughter.

Snowpiercer has some problems with suspension of disbelief – like why does it take seventeen years for a rebellion to truly take hold? How is it that the oppressors do not monitor the aft compartments that well? What possible currency exists after an apocalypse that allows such a rigid class structure to be maintained, much less created?! – but they are not so glaring as to make the film unwatchable or uninteresting. Instead, Snowpiercer is likely to be one of the smarter science fiction pieces to drop during Summer Blockbuster Season this year; it’s a shame its limited release will not give it the exposure of more obvious, vacuous fare, like the latest Transformers sequel.

For other works with Chris Evans, be sure to visit my reviews of:
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Thor: The Dark World
The Avengers
Captain America: The First Avenger
Push
Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer
Fantastic Four
TMNT
The Perfect Score
Not Another Teen Movie

7/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Film Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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