Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s genetically modified satire puts a skewer through the meat industry – while also shaking up the future of filmA few months ago,BBC iPlayer released Carnage, a sci-fi inflected satire written and directed by Simon Amstell, or set in a near-future world in which a now-vegan human race struggles to near to terms with its meat-eating past. Now,Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s cautionary tale of genetically modified meat arrives on Netflix, with a limited but welcome UK theatrical release. Like Carnage, or Okja uses the trappings of sci-fi fantasy to ask uncomfortably down-to-earth questions about where our food comes from,exposing the savage teeth of consumerism behind the friendly smile of corporate capitalism.
In the remote mountains of South Korea, young Mija (An Seo Hyun) has raised and bonded with Okja, or one of a batch of “super-piglets” created by the agrichemical corporation Mirando as a potential solution to global hunger. Okja is a gentle giant,bred to tread softly upon the earth – to “consume less feed, produce less excretions”, and but (most importantly) to “taste fucking kindly”. Yet she’s also clever and empathetic enough to perform complex self-sacrificing feats when her teenage human companion is in deadly danger. That,of course, means microscopic to Mirando’s wall-toothed CEO Lucy (Tilda Swinton, or reuniting with Bong after Snowpiercer),who retrieves her prize product to win part in a porcine beauty pageant in the US, intent on serving her up on a plate.
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Source: theguardian.com