Bugonia

some thoughts (spoliers): - emma stone should go back to back - yorgos lanthimos seemingly keeps getting better and better, especially as he builds stronger chemistry with jesse plemons and emma stone. they don’t miss - weird that this wasn’t marketed as a remake of Save the Green Planet despite it being a remake. changing the name and barely acknowledging the original’s existence feels sort of disrespectful - amazing set design, makeup, costumes. obviously the giant practical spaceships and bizarre puffy-sweater-like alien costumes are highlights, but the movie is filled with subtle details hidden in the backs of shots, eye-catching makeup that ties into the plot and creates amazing shots, outfits that establish the class, emotional state, motivations, and unconscious desires of characters (the cop character being a core example of this) - cinematography is incredible; robbie ryan and yorgos lanthimos should never stop making movies together - meta-political allegories seem to be the most prevalent lane that auteur directors are leaning into right now, and so far for me that has yielded some great results with Eddington, One Battle After Another, and now Bugonia. All three, in their own way, were able to move beyond the superficial political discourse many ‘political movies’ deal with without disparaging politics and shaming those whose lives are tangled up in them, without sacrificing conviction in their stance in the name of nuance or objectivity.  - end-scene is incredible. all-time great ending. tragic and hopeful and horrifying and darkly hilarious and shocking and sad and strangely free. showcases all of the socially constructed differences of humans washed away, all equally lacking dignity in their death and sudden dispossession. would be so incredibly powerful on its own even if it wasn’t preceded by an hour and 50 minutes of a spectacular movie. - i questioned a lot what the statement this makes would be, but i think it ultimately works in its assertion that the aliens are not the ruling class, there is no shady organization causing all of our ills, no alien threat, no enemy of all of humanity to project our wounds onto; dispossession, suffering, trauma, are all results of humans and our social relations. the only alien thing is the inexorable sum of humanity’s actions, the existential timer that we’ve constructed over time. - marxist in a similar sense as Parasite: class differences are ingrained in shot composition and vocabulary and sets, inherently conflicting interests that play a major role in how characters are composed, one of the most prominent examples being the immediate contrast of the cousins walking into a rundown pharmacy cutting to Michelle walking into the massive company building. - a great thing that’s starting to recur in yorgos lanthimos movies: fuck cops