Also I’ll say I haven’t seen as many annoying reactions to this one as I expected, probably because it underperformed. But I was bracing myself for the worst takes imaginable lol

Jinnistan wrote:

Will Tracy's script is a weak spot though.  He's no stranger to snarky and obnoxiously obvious nihilism (The Menu), and where the original film revels in its absurdity, it seems that Tracy just might be dumb enough to believe all of it.

I'm going to have to post this here since it will involve divulging the end of Bugonia, and to a lesser extent Save the Green Planet.

My suspicions around Will Tracy have been confirmed when I saw some comments he made in an interview where he claimed that he considers the ending of Bugonia as a "happy ending".  

Bugonia ends with the eradication of the human race.  This is slightly different than the ending of Save the Green Planet which saw the destruction of the entire planet Earth.  The distinction is not arbitrary.  Because Green Planet is much more of an absurdist black comedy, this resolution plays similar to, say, the destruction of Earth in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where this reflects more of the utter indifference of the alien race which causes the destruction to the human species.  In Bugonia, however, this extinction event is portrayed as saving the (flat) planet in what appears to be a sincere attempt at some kind of ecological sermon.  Compare as well, in Bugonia we see a montage of dead humans, engaged in various mundane activities at the time of this instantaneous extinction, which is played for ironic laughs in a cheap echo of Kubrick's "We'll Meet Again".  The indifference here appears to be more from Tracy and Lanthimos than the aliens, which is even more repugnant that it presumes to be from a pretense of moral superiority.  Green Planet shows a montage of the ill-fated human protagonist in pictures throughout his life, which reinforces the value of his humanity, however led astray by his conspiratorial delusions, rather than negates it.  In Bugonia humanity itself is the toxic virus, and its eradication is shown as a net positive,  It's empty edgelord bullshit.

Google wrote:

Humanity triggers its own extinction due to selfishness and inability to change, with Emma Stone's character, Michelle, ascending as an alien empress and deciding humans must die for ecological balance. While this means the end of humanity, it brings peace for Michelle and the natural world, suggesting humans earned their fate through their own destructive, cynical behavior.

I'll refer back to my review of Will Tracy's similarly abhorrent The Menu: "Among the more recent fashionably spiteful pseudo-satires, the common lame and lazy trend has been to mistake nihilism for substantive class critique."  The nihilism in Will Tracy's script for Bugonia is uncontestable.  The attempt at "class critique" is clear from the outset, as the film begins with interchanging scenes contrasting the lifestyles of the wealthy pharmaceutical CEO with that of the lower-class kidnappers.  We can see both the elitist spite exuding from Emma Stone's CEO as well as Tracy/Lanthimos' own spiteful poverty-caricature of the kidnappers, who eat shitty junk food, wear outdated and unkempt suits (in their naive attempt at projecting respectability) and with the strong suggestion that they, unlike CEO Stone. are not very well educated, hence their attraction to online conspiracism.  From there, the critique is simply abandoned.

Updating Green Planet to address the modern eruption in online conspiracy and disinformation is a good idea, but it's notable how Bugonia fails at this.  In a true class critique, it should be observed that in the US' current late-capitalist decadence that the decline of our public school systems, along with the tuition-fleecing of higher education, has left an indelible void for which online media has had to fill for much of the decaying middle-class, and what we've witnessed over the past 10-15 years is to what increasingly extreme degrees this large bulk of the populace has turned to questionable, "viral" narratives to make sense of this obvious but so-frequently ignored (by tech/media corporations) trend of quality-of-life decline in our increasingly infantilizing "pop" consumerist culture.  A true class critique might just identify these kidnappers as victims of this trend.  It might even be so bold as to identify "the ruling elite" (embodied here as the 'Andomedan' aliens) as the culprit of the decay, rather than, as Bugonia prefers to characterize them, as some well-intentioned guardians of civilization.

Nope.  Instead the kidnappers are portrayed as avatars of humanity's failures, and the Andomedans as the saviors of all terrestrial - non-human - life.  But in late-capitalist decadence, it is the ruling elites, not the plebeians, who are most responsible for its decadence.  The plebeians weren't the ones pooling their resources to build colosseums for lions to devour slaves.  The ruling elites are the ones who hoard their taxes to starve public education and health care.  The ruling elities are the tech billionaires who have algorithmically poisoned our sense of truth, who profit from purposely spreading enticing falsehoods.  And now it is the ruling elites in the media corporations who have been normalizing, even romanticizing, civilizational collapse (The Walking Dead, The Purge), the erosion of empathy (Survivor and most "reality" TV generally) while exploiting the public's anxieties from the real psychic damage of this demoralization.  If Bugonia was being honest, the Andomedans have been the most toxic global influence, through their mismanagement, through their hubris.  But instead, the film misplaces the blame on "humanity" writ large, despite their lack of agency at countering the Andromedan's secret and invisible influence.  This is akin to blaming climate change on people who don't recycle thier plastics.

Again, am I taking the ending of this film too seriously?  No, I'm simply assuming that Will Tracy is being honest when he calls it a "happy ending".  For whom?  The bees presumably?  But whenever I've come across adherents of whatever "voluntary human extinction" sentiment, my response is the same, "You do you".  I have no beef with the Right-To-Die folks.  But the kicker is that more often than not, those people spouting such hipster nihilism are not actually willing to follow their creed.  The problem isn't them, it's the rest of us losers that gotta go.  Will Tracy is not going anywhere, he's still cashing his paychecks and buying the latest phones.  This demoralization isn't for them.  They're busy building bunkers.  They want the rest of us, on the other side of the moat, to "do the right thing", so they no longer have to worry about any inconvenient obligations to care about us.

Bugonia could still have been a fine Lanthimos joint if it had retained the Green Planet ending, which was to reiterate the pharma CEO's implicit sociopathy and ultimate indifference to humanity.  But instead it tried to have it both ways.  Trying to mock Plemons' kidnapper for his rabbit-hole radicalization, only to prove him right.  Showing Stone's CEO as a cold, callous and unaffectionate woman, only to try to make her into an extraterrestrial saint.  Ending with a quasi-Kubrick rip-off which, like producer Ari Aster's opening to Midsommar, wallows in unearned trauma-porn.  And then tries to have the sac to sit on the moral high-ground?