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July 1st, 2017 
Awake Goy Can movies be made that attack the prejudices and cruelties of 95% of the human race and be financially viable? Will the guilty party pay to see themselves raked over the coals? Are speciesist bigots so detached from their emotions and reality that they dont even realize that they are being criticized?
In the South Korean/US 2017 release, Okja, the answer to the first two questions is: not without a lot of attempted humor, action, tokenism, cartoonish characters that undercut a serious message and a nonsensical happy ending. The answer to the last question is at the end of this article. And I actually like this film.
Okja is one of 26 super pigs created in a lab by an evil corporation and given to various farmers around the world to raise in natural settings. Thats why Okja is put on a remote forested South Korean mountain where there are lots of cliffs to slip off of. Okja looks like a hippopotamus but is the size of an elephant and is so special that she is going to be killed and eaten as environmentally sustainable meat. Somehow raising and killing these quasi-dinosaurs for food doesnt have much environmental impact. The film is labeled “action-adventure” but it’s more a rapid-fire multi-leveled satire. The willing suspension of disbelief should be bought in the extra large size before entering the theatre.
Okja is raised by a young South Korean girl named Mija and her grandfather. For ten years this is a happy story about a girl and her 5,000 ton hog/dog and their romps through the forest, occasionally saving each others lives and curling up each night with nary a snort or the crushing of young girl bones.
Unfortunately, as family members are wont to do, the grandfather has been treacherously deceiving Mija all along, letting her believe that he purchased Okja as a pet. But then the evil corporation comes and takes Okja away, far away to New York City where the grand experiment of the super pigs will be unveiled to the world in a Macys-like parade. While still in South Korea, Mija runs down the mountain to Seoul and almost singlehandedly saves Okja but what to our wondering eyes should appear: the Animal Liberation Front who step in with their own utilitarian plans.
The ALF, the head of the evil corporation (Tilda Swinton) and the corporations zany zoologist front man (Jake Gyllenhaal) are all over-the-top caricatures. It should go without saying that the computer-generated Okja with her intelligence, quiet dignity and innocence gives the most moving performance.
So whats good about this fast-moving mishmash? The films heart is in all the right places: animal farmers and vivisectors are presented as the scum bags they are. The zoologist is a combination of the Columbus Zoos Jack Hanna and Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin and, as with Jack Hanna, there is a dark side: Gyllenhaals character is a torturing vivisector just as Jack Hanna did television commercials for Ohio trappers to defeat legislation to ban leg hold traps and also commercials to legalize mourning dove hunting. The public would laugh at Hanna and his animals on David Lettermans show but animal activists knew him as a betrayer of animals just as Gyllenhaals character is. The goofiness of the ALF characters bear no resemblance to the hard-headed revolutionaries in the real ALF but there is a mini-tutorial on ALF history that isnt half bad.
Where the film picks up emotional wallop is in the slaughterhouse where Okja is in the restraint device and about to have the captive bolt pistol shot into her head. Mija comes face to face with her best friend, her love, about to meet a hideous unjust fate. Most moving of all is the next scene of the holding pens outside the slaughterhouse where, wordlessly, but with beautiful instrumental music playing, Okja and Mija walk away to freedom, managing to save a token piglet, next to rows of hundreds of penned, doomed, terrified proletarian pigs who struggle to stand, rise up and bang against the fences.
Killing Okja wouldnt sell movie tickets any more than the devastating ending of Brian De Palmas masterwork Blow Out. Mija cant cut all the fences and let the pigs out to trample the villains, she cant come equipped with a gun to blow away all bad guys (cuz the real-life behind-the-scenes bad guys paid $11.00 to sit in the audience and watch this) and she cant bring the apocalypse to the slaughterhouse even though thats what it deserves because she has to end up back on the mountain, not locked down for 23 hours a day in one of Americas supermax prisons.
So Okja is spared on the word of the most evil person in the movie which makes no sense at all but it does get Okja and Mija back together and theres no messy scene of Mija confronting her grandfather about his treachery. A token animal is saved and the overall sickness and dysfunction goes peacefully, though not justly, on, in South Korea as well as Hollywood. Its so difficult to produce great art about speciesism when film makers have to dance around the depravity of you meat eaters. Youre such a drag a drag on the planet, a drag on art and a drag on the spiritual and emotional development of the human species.
After the film, I asked four young people if they were vegetarians. They said no. Would this movie make you think about becoming vegetarian? Three said they didnt know and one said it might. The three who didnt know acted like there was no connection at all to what they just saw and their daily eating of beings. They just sat through two hours of being told that they are intellectually and emotionally bankrupt hypocritical monsters but they didnt know about that. Okja, directed by Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer and The Host) is now on Netflix.
Source Article from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DarkPolitricks/~3/7fYo9WZiKHs/
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