Okja (Netflix)

...the things you manage to find when you're surfing Youtube for trailers.

It's a film about the bond between a parkour expert and a genetically altered super pig, with guest appearances from Glenn Rhee and Gus Fring.

It looks awesome and adorable.

edited 29th Jun '17 8:01:36 PM by Soble

Uh...hmm...

I mean, I watched both The Host and Snowpiercer, but I'm not sure if I should watch this one or not.

I just saw this and IT'S NICE

I mean, on one hand, it works as a straightforward E.T.-style heartwarming family adventure - but on the other, it has profanities dropping down by the barrel, bouts of family-unfriendly (if non-lethal) violence, and some seriously disturbing depiction of animal abuse. That said, it's a visual and musical threat throughout, and I feel that they managed to present the central themes of corporate ethics and the price of consumerism as something for the audience to ponder instead of shoving a view down their throats - which, again, is pretty nice.

I've also watched it and found it pretty enjoyable even though it had some flaws. What I don't understand is how some critics found the scenes at the slaughterhouse to be eye-opening and graphic. I'm usually very easily shocked by violence, but there was nothing in this movie that I did not know and see beforehand. If there are people out there, that until this movie didn't know how industrial lifestock farming and slaughter works than I congratulate them on their sheltered lifestyle.

Oh, dude, I really want to watch this movie but if there are graphic slaughterhouse scenes then I don't think I can possibly enjoy it.

The movie gets very emotionally disturbing at places, but it certainly refrains from using blood and gore gratuitously. I'd say that if you can handle the sight of your local supermarket's meat aisle, you can handle this.

If you really want to know, it features the following scenes (ranked from most to least graphic):

• A butchered and skinned super-pig carcass is split in half with a meatpacking chainsaw. It's done in a very industrial, businesslike setting, and the movie doesn't really dwell on it.
• A super-pig is killed with a boltgun shot to the head and then dumped into a conveyor belt. It's more upsetting than graphic, and you don't really see any blood or visible wound.
• A plant worker is seen mopping up a large pool of blood.
• One of the antagonists uses a large, syringe-like device to extract meat from a super-pig while it's still alive. The scene cuts away just as it happens.
• A frightened female super-pig is forcefully mated to a large, aggressive male. This was easily the hardest scene for me (and the characters) to watch. The deed itself is only seen through a window on a small LCD screen, though the sounds are quite audible.
• Throughout the movie, Okja is repeatedly forced into claustrophobic spaces and receives numerous injuries, including a small (but bloody) foot laceration.
• A large number of super-piglets, some of them with physical deformations, are seen locked up in tiny cages in a dark, damp basement.
• A massive herd of super-pigs are are packed together inside an electric-fenced factory farm with barely any space between them. Some of the super-pigs are herded in a line with cattle prods, clearly frightened.
• Most of the human-on-human violence is slapstick, but some of the characters get beaten up pretty badly.
• Throughout the movie, you can see various meat products, like sausages and jerky, made out of the super-pigs. Not exactly graphic, but considering that the title character is one such super-pig, it gets unnerving very fast.

The devious thing is, the genetically-engineered, elephant-sized super-pigs of dubious legality are pretty much the only sci-fi element in the movie. Everything else Mirando does is pretty much straight out of real-life industrial farming practices, and in that respect, it really compels the audience to think about the process behind their dinner table.

Okay, none of that stuff is as bad as I feared. It'll probably be heartbreaking but art is supposed to stimulate your emotions, maaan. Will definitely watch.

Thanks for the heads-up, though.

I feel Okja is allegory for eating dog's meat. Okja is (and superpigs in general are) portrayed as highly intelligent, capable of complex thought.

And if people are ok with eating dog, they definitely will have no qualms eating a tasty, though thinking, piggy.

Real pigs are pretty smart too.

It was a good movie, and while a core theme was certainly corporate (lack of) ethics and factory farming generally, it touched on a lot of things. One of the sub-themes that struck me was critique of the pressure on woman to seem "cute" and "nice". Both the twin sisters are terrible in their own ways, but it's notable that the one who focuses on image, and lots of pink, and coming across as sweet is the one who fails, and the nasty one who doesn't care about image is the one who's successful. There's also continual attempts to market Mija as the cute kid, which she mostly resists (scowling in all the photoshoots, refusing to dress in the outfits they give her until she has no choice). In the end, Mija and Nancy are both opting for blunt, effective methods rather than going with a charm offensive.

The one thing that I thought didn't work was the way they portrayed the mating scene. Animals mate. It happens. In many species, domestic or in the wild, it's not loving or gentle, at all. I've watched too many BBC Earth documentaries to be shocked or upset by that, so the horror displayed by the characters watching it felt rather comical to me. Trying to apply a human concept like "rape" to an animal mating with another animal just really, really doesn't work.

I'll be honest now that you've described that scene, the image I'm seeing in the thumbnail of that trailer is just a little more disturbing.

I have to trust that this pig was somehow conditioned to be the girl's best friend, Clifford the Big, Gray Pig basically.

The scene I described isn't in the trailer.

Animals have no concept of murder either but you still don't want your dog to be torn to shreds by a bigger dog. It's not silly or wrong for the girl to not want her big pig pal to have an unwanted, traumatic sexual experience.

(I still haven't seen the movie, so excuse me for not knowing the characters' names yet. I'm guessing the pig is Okja but I don't wanna pull a "Why can't Metroid crawl?")

The Mirando sister we see for most of the film actually does seem legitimately well intentioned. She's about as ethical as a non-vegetarian CEO can be, and engineered the pigs to be bigger so as to provide more product and less excretion (and there's apparently no health problems from being that size since Okja is highly mobile and healthy at age 10). She also seemed to genuinely care about Milja's feelings for Okja. Arguably, all she did wrong (assuming you don't find meat production bad in itself) was lie to the customers about her product being non-GMO.

Saw it. It's pretty good!

Jake Gyllenhaal was trying so, so hard to be Rhys Darby, though.

Oh my God.