Wick's Review

Summary - Perfect 5.0

Okja [Oak-ja] grabs your heart and doesn’t let go. It’s a perfect movie from shoulder to shank, as pure an experience of cinematic magic as the best of Spielberg. But Spielberg it ain’t. Bong it is — Bong Joon Ho.

The brilliant Korean auteur made Okja in 2017, four years after Snowpiercer and two before his Palme d’Or winning Parasite. Unlike that misanthropic triumph, Okja is super sweet, as sweet as the relationship between a super plucky little girl and a bioengineered pig the size of a hippo could be, i.e., hog wild sweet.

Assured from the open, set in New York City, all bright lights and big business, it soon begins taking one profoundly fanciful turn after another. Some of those turns are scary, many are ironic, but several are utterly charming. One must go back to Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin to recall such sweet cinematic tickles.

Most of the movie is set in South Korea, complete with subtitles, given that Koreans speak Korean to each another – and to Okja. Not to worry, Bong is a global moviemaker of the first order. His movies work with audiences everywhere, as Okja utterly proves by traversing from NYC to a paradisiacal mountainside farm in Korea, to the gotham of Seoul and finally back to the Big Apple – a trip any movielover will love to take.

Okja kinda wears its politics on its sleeve, though that ends up being less off-putting that the trailer might make you imagine. Leftist in orientation, it gives factory farming the full Nazi treatment. Yet it deals fairly with the motives of pretty much every character, many of whom appear as good and then evil, or evil and then good, and then back again. Now that’s great moviemaking! Okja is a truly great movie and then some.

Acting - Really Great 4.5

Ahn Seo-hyun is supremely great as the young farmgirl who takes care of a supersized pig. Everyone lies to her character, but Ahn’s eyes resolutely display mission and confidence. The girl is a star.

Hollywood moviestars Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal & Paul Dano also light up Bong Joon Ho’s movie.

• Tilda Swinton uses her mega-wattage star-power to great effect as the willful CEO of a global food corporation, and also as her twin sister, who was the former CEO. Wowza, Swinton is a superstar.
• Jake Gyllenhaal chews scenery as a zoologist who’s now a weirdo TV personality.
• Paul Dano underwhelms as the leader of the Animal Liberation Front.
• Byun Hee-bong is quite affecting as an elderly Korean farmer and grandfather.
• Lily Collins underwhelms as an animal-rights activist.
• Giancarlo Esposito grovels effectively as a CEO’s lackey.

Film - Perfect 5.0

Bong Joon Ho brilliantly skewers both sides of the global meat market, and delivers a super sweet film in the process. BRILLLLLIANT

Edge - Tame 1.5

Reality - Supernatural 3.2

Okja is a supersmart hippo-sized super pig produced by supernatural bio and physio-reality effects. Circoreality is more tame, yet still rates a not immodest 2.5x surreal.
Average it all out and Okja is a robustly supernatural movie.

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