Okja

Beautiful and painful film. It shows how animals are treated by humans, or for their use or as just a piece of meat. I would like to see all the free animals at the end of the movie, but understand that despite them being a movie they wanted to portray the reality of the business world. Sad, but necessary. Congratulations Netflix, note ten.

Proud to be a vegan for over a year now. Hopefully this movie will make people think. This happenes all over the world. Every day. Every second. And not just pigs. Every animal we eat goes though this (1:39-1:48). Every animal feels pain. Has emotions. #govegan

This film goes straight to the heart <3 really touching & in my opinion a Si-Fi-Version of the truth!!
Love it - well done!

Amazing scenario and casting. So touchy but that's our real world.

From the film poster to performances, and from cinematography to characters, the film is brilliant. Then there is Paul Dano. He is just a pleasure to watch. Okja left a lasting impact on me as a moviegoer.

An American MNC starts a 10-year project to develop a perfect pig. They have given the piglets to farmers all over the world and created a competition out of this. The winning animal they can mass produce and rake in profits. Your usual capitalist nightmare. One such pig is Okja from Korea. She is being raised by a mountain-dwelling farmer and his granddaughter Mija. Naturally Mija and Okja and close to each other. 10 years pass and it's time to examine and surrender the pigs back to the company. It is officially still their property. But not without a fight.

It is not a creature feature. Okja has very little to do in the film. The film is about Mija, the capitalist corporate suits i.e. Tilda Swinton and the Animal Liberation Front or the ALF i.e. Paul Dano. The ALF are very serious about non-violent ways. And even assault and kidnapping are very graciously executed. That is the moment Bong Joon-ho gets hold of you and then never lets go till the very end.

The movie starts a bit slow to establish the relationship between Mija and Okja and even goes on to show how Okja is an intelligent animal. With that much establishment, you would expect a bit more from the pig, but that does not come. Agreed that there is so much else happening that you don't miss it very much until after the movie is finished.

Darius Khondji's camera work is really good. From a mountain village and jungles to urban glass structures, his camera accentuates all the details. It tugs at your heartstrings towards the very end. The end is realistic, and not entirely tragic, but it keeps you thinking about the world. You keep imagining if any other non-idealistic utopian ending was even possible. When you are thinking about this, the story takes us back to Korea and the sombre mood intensifies with Darius's camera. No words are spoken for a long time which gives you time to process and recover.

This genre-bending tale is worth watching for many reasons. It has a friendship between a girl and a super-pig, and it also has themes of capitalism, industrialisation and veganism.

Bong Joon-ho's American co productions are always fascinating for how he takes these concepts that Hollywood would eagerly want and remains true to his style, heart, and vision. Snowpiercer took what many would use as a setpiece action blockbuster and used it for a searing drama on class and the limits of compromise. And Okja took the classic 'A girl and her animal' framework and delivers a sobering, unyielding experience. It's no feel good movie, but one that absolutely makes you _feel_. Everyone is cast and directed to perfection. The lingering on Dano's soulful eyes... Perfectly harnessing Glyeenhaal's paradoxical pathetic charisma... Swinton embodying two different but equally perverse faces of capitalism, each uniquely rotten to the core... And Ahn Seo-hyun keeping pace with all of them. Bong Joon-ho is so thoughtful and precise with everything he's aiming for, and so uncompromisingly himself. There's police brutality, animal exploitation, using an actual resistance movement with all its weighed history. Not idealized but not demonized, and unabashedly a force of good.

It has the strength to resist both an easy, big win ending, and a despairing one. There is no single victory. There's many small ones, and you eke out what you can, making things better even fractionally. You can't erase the cruelties, and you shouldn't, but you can love and hope, you can bring a little girl back home to her best friend and you can _fight_. The fight goes on. Like Snowpiercer, it's hard not to see the lessons learned from this film that Bong Joon-ho would go on to apply to Parasite, but Okja more than stands on its own. Parasite was a cathartic recognition of what we all endure, and the tragedy the system leaves. Okja sees the tools we can use to fight it. This film was just a damn pleasant surprise from a movie I already expected to be good and a director I want to see more and more of.

It goes from cute to brutal in a most brilliant way.

This movie was so amazing! We loved it from start to end, even though it's so shocking at the same time (though you realise it's not even much different than how the world is today…). Definitely a must see movie for 2017!

That final scene, good throwback to The Host. Well done Bong, well done.

The first of half of this movie kinda felt like a live action Studi Ghibli movie and then shit gets real.