So… a Hopeful Ending?
It’s worth noting that the ending is actually one of the places where Bugonia differs most from its source material in Save the Green Planet! While that movie likewise concludes with the kidnapped CEO revealed to be an alien king who decides we have failed him, the implications are starker. A bright apocalyptic line shines on the faces of strangers throughout the world, and finally on a sad abandoned dog before the entire planet explodes. Nothing is left except a television floating through the cosmos playing old VHS tapes of Teddy’s Korean proxy. The home movies show him as a child with the parents who are long gone.
It is nihilistic in the extreme, albeit in a stylish, early 2000s way. Lanthimos’ film seems to have a similar nihilism, and yet notably the dogs do not die. The animals live. Only the humans are extinguished. That carries meaning to screenwriter Will Tracy, who made the change. And when we talked with him about the film, he opened up about his own perception of the ending.
“The aliens in that film kind of threw the baby out with the bathwater,” Tracy says of the original Korean picture. “In this film, they just kind of turn off all the humans. We just fall asleep like robots forever, and we’re just gone. And yet, we’re still there in the tableau at the end. We see a world without humans, but also you see those people in those moments of death, and they’re quiet and banal, and idiosyncratic and a little weird, a little bit funny, a little bit sad and warm. You see some of the bad things that people do and some of the good things that people do, and you basically get a panoply of the whole human experience there at the end. That’s to me the big difference between the endings. You see everything we’d be losing, good and bad, without us.”
Furthermore, the writer considers this a strangely hopeful ending, albeit not for the reasons I previously suggested wherein Lanthimos might be teasing the planet is better off without homo sapiens.
“A really bleak ending would be saying, ‘Well, it’s always going to be like that,’” Tracy contends. “But to me, it’s like this hasn’t happened, and it will not happen, so you don’t have to think of it like, ‘Well, that’s the fate that we’re doomed for.’ You can look at it as like, ‘If we don’t want that kind of ending for ourselves, then we have to start listening to each other. And we have to start making actually robust and sane civic institutions that look out for each other.’ We have to stop destroying ourselves. So that’s a constructive, hopeful way of looking at the ending.”
Ultimately the finale is designed to be open to interpretation, and to stir what Tracy sees as a conversation.
