"Okja" is a heavy-handed and somewhat simplistic critique of the meat industry in which, due to a highly contrived plot, a young girl's beloved pet 'super-pig' ends up at the abattoir. The satire is neither subtle (I assume that "Mirando" was as close to "Monsanto" as the producers' lawyers would allow) nor clever (the wicked capitalists are just stupid and greedy strawmen) and the characters played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Tilda Swinton are over-the-top to a point of being almost unwatchable. These weakness are unfortunate, because if the story, script and acting were up to the level of the outstanding special effects, the movie might have become a classic children's film. The take-home message of "Okja" is pretty blatant and judging by some of the gushing comments about this film, director Joon-ho Bong was often 'preaching to the choir', but I don't think that the film is either clever or 'real' enough to actually change peoples' minds about meat ("Babe" didn't and an actual piglet is a more sympathetic character than a CGI hippo-pig, however well rendered (excuse the pun)). Also undermining the story and the message is the frequent and gratuitous use of profanity, which seems to have been included more for cheap laughs than for story or character development, and seems out of place in what struck me as basically a movie for the kids.
Review of Okja
