Review of Okja (2017) by John M — 04 Sep 2017

Heartfelt. So in the future, a food corporation has been working on the science to make the next big thing happen in food: the super-pig. It is engineered to be giant, delicious and 100% environmentally friendly so as to minimize our footprint on the Earth.

It's brand new, so they distribute only a handful to be raised at various locations across the globe before getting ready for the big launch years down the line. This leaves plenty of time for a connection to be developed between our protagonist young girl (Seo-Hyun Ahn) and her pet pig named Okja.

.. but of course, the company is going to want to reclaim the pig for the animal's intended purpose. Speaking as somebody who owns a giant, friendly Labrador (Oberon Tiberius Burke is the BEST), I found this film quite easy to connect with this.

It is not subtle in that it is appealing to animal lovers, and if you are already a pet owner, you can just forget about it, as you will already be transposing your own animal companion upon this pig.

Okja is friendly, clumsy, loyal and lovable, and makes for a great foundation to build a movie upon. Now this is from acclaimed Korean director Joon-ho Bong who I am personally a fan of. He's an auteur, and while I didn't love Snowpiercer as much as most, I do love The Host and have heard nothing but good things about the movie Mother which is getting an American remake by Aronofsky later this year.

The home market seems like a logical fit for him, as I know of a lot of people who have watched this because Netflix knows how to market and advertise their product. It's kind of hard not to be won over by this, especially if you are already geared towards animals.

It's a boy and his story (or in this case, a girl and her pig, but you get what I'm trying to say), which is a story template that I have always been a fan of (How to Train Your Dragon, E.T., The Iron Giant).

The effect that is Okja looks great, even on the small screen, and it is impressive how little you think of it being a special effect, which has everything to do with the performance given by this little girl.

There's so much to love about this... and that leads me to the unexpected saboteur. Now I do recognize Jake Gyllenhaal as being a talented actor, and for the most part, I enjoy his work (Nightcrawler, especially).

In here, I will go so far to say that he is worse than he was in Accidental Love and in Bubble Boy. He's playing a role that would typically go to Sacha Baron Cohen, but he just doesn't know how to pull that off effectively.

You overlook it at first, because he only pops up for a minute, but then he keeps showing up, and he gets progressively worse as this goes on. It's something that I had to blur my eyes to overlook, because I genuinely like everything that this movie is doing, other than that recurring pinprick.