journal features

movie review - Okja

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2017.07.07

This is a film about a semi-sentient animal named Okja; she's a genetically modified super-pig, larger and tastier than ever and stationed by an eccentrically-run company with a young girl in Korea. Naturally, when it's time for processed meat the girl stands up to fight the system. She finds the ready support of eco-rebels hell-bent on taking down the company and setting free the super-pigs.

I need to be clear, this is not a cartoon in any sense. There's literally a scene in which some of the super-pigs, waiting the slaughter, implore some passing humans to take their child. It's more holocaust story than cartoon. There are scenes in here, like when poor Okja is forcibly inseminated to cause a pregnancy, that you will not want to see or remember or consider that someone designed & rendered it. I think of this damn movie every single time I buy meat products.

Sci-fi super-pig holocaust? Gritty scenes you won't want to see? Recommended.

rand()m quote

The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov