Avis des critiques

Okja is, fittingly, a strange beast: part eco-political morality tale, part slapstick, part creature feature, things that don't always gel... Taken as a whole, however, one feels that something exciting is being done in the throwing together of these disparate elements, something exciting that only Netflix would take a punt on Bong attempting.

Aside from Tilda Swinton's hyperactive appeal and some flickers of visual invention (a giggling schoolgirl filming herself being chased through a department store by the titular giant pig), Bong's predictable tale of corporate hubris and animal rights ambivalence feels itself like a talented director submitting to commerce, as Netflix, which funded the film, seemingly frowns on the rough edges of his past.

The image confirms the obvious—that the eye of the six-ton Okja is as large as Mija's face—but it also does something magical: it makes believe that Okja is real and that she and Mija are inseparable. We believe in Okja's reality not only because An as Mija relates to her as if she is there, but also because of the extraordinary digital animation of that eye.

If Okja's American section is the weaker half of the film, it may be because Bong's audacity gets the better of him. Okja herself becomes a metaphor for the film—big, smart, gentle-souled, and occasionally out of control... When Okja works, it evokes a sense of genuine wonder. For all its brilliant mayhem, the movie's bookending idylls may well be what endure in memory.

Mija and her grandfather's domestic life is introduced in a series of gently comic scenes that take up nearly the entire first half-hour. Yet when the gears shift abruptly for a wild pig chase through a busy Seoul mall, our attention never wavers; we're ready to dive right in to what has all of a sudden become an action movie. Soon Okja will veer into other, equally unforeseeable zones, all of which seem to make sense once you get there.

The movie tirelessly wrestles with the idea that attacking capitalism's symptoms will never destroy its source. But who or what, and where is the source? To question warrants the need to identify every space, every participant complicit in the capitalist structure... Though Okja delivers on this front, still the answer evades its ambitious grasp towards clarity. Even so, the film is Bong's politically densest work thus far, refusing ideological compromise to think until it reaches a dead end.

...These two modes might seem incompatible, but as overseen by the great South Korean director Bong Joon-ho ("Snowpiercer," "The Host"), they mesh with such grace that the result is a work of melancholy enchantment, by turns sweet, raucously funny, scary and sad, and—in the manner of all good science fiction movies—thought-provoking.

There's a darkness to Bong's vision that sometimes seems like it's being reined in — even here, and even as the movie drips with clever cynicism. The movie is enjoyable, but part of me wishes it had really _gone there_ — I mean, why not? Okja didn't have to withstand the vindictive malingering of Harvey Weinstein, as Snowpiercer did. You watch with some confidence that the movie is Bong's. That doesn't promise a richer vision, but maybe it shouldn't have to.

Framed around the experiences of the fiercely un-precious Mija, who becomes a half-grown action hero, Okja unfolds like a fable about a child and their nonhuman pal that's been warped into something bleak and outrageous — E.T. by way of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Mija pursues Okja with scowling conviction through foot chases, car chases, and paw chases that send the characters crashing thrillingly through a city mall.

A choppy mix of anti-corporate farce and Spielbergian fantasy, Bong Joon-Ho's bilingual Okja veers wildly, but never stalls; if Bong, the South Korean writer-director behind The Host, Memories Of Murder, and Snowpiercer, never squares the film's satirical means with its sentimental ends, he at least throws the weight of his considerable filmmaking talent behind both.

A transporting protest fantasy becomes another shrill dust-up in the waging of the culture wars.

Even though the human-animal relationship is hastily sketched, [Ahn's] piercing eyes and surfeit of plucky determination act as a constant reminder of the 10 unseen years this unlikely duo have spent together. Okja is a good film rather than a great one, perhaps lacking the element of surprise that made Snowpiercer such a dream.