Bugonia Was Always Going To End This Way
Bugonia writer Will Tracy talks about the bleak ending, and why it speaks so urgently to this moment in time.
Warning! Spoilers ahead for Bugonia.
At the end of Save the Green Planet! the twisted 2003 Korean sci-fi black comedy directed by Jang Joon-hwan, the CEO kidnapped by a conspiracy theorist who believes him to be an alien in disguise is revealed to be... an alien in disguise. Escaping from his captor, the CEO returns to his alien spaceship and orders the destruction of Earth, having become disgusted with the “failed experiment” that is humanity. It’s a bleak ending that seems ripe to be changed for the Hollywood remake of the film. But with the Weird Wave King Yorgos Lanthimos helming the remake, the bizarre alien twist and its resulting bleak ending was always going to remain.
The Menu writer Will Tracy pens Bugonia, Lanthimos’ remake of Save the Green Planet! which updates the movie for contemporary times and gender-bends the CEO (now played by an icy Emma Stone). But even with an ending that remains very similar to the original, Tracy tells Inverse that he and Lanthimos never considered changing it to make it more palatable for U.S. audiences.
“There was never really a discussion about changing the ending or having a backup ending,” Tracy says. “The ending that we have is quite a strong flavor.”
Inverse spoke with Tracy about why the ending hits so much harder in 2025 than in 2003, and how the film’s handful of changes from the original worked out for the better.
Bugonia’s Ending Explained
Teddy (Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) observe an unconscious Michelle.
Throughout Bugonia, we’re kept in a state of uncertainty as to whether Jesse Plemons’ Teddy Gatz, a conspiracy theory-obsessed beekeeper, is right or not in his belief that Stone’s Michelle Fuller is actually an alien. He has all the makings of a delusional lunatic: he regularly listens to conspiracy podcasts, makes wild statements about aliens that can communicate with their hair, and of course, kidnaps Michelle and imprisons her in his basement.
As Michelle gradually learns more about her captor, so do we: It turns out Teddy may hold a personal grudge against the pharmaceutical company that Michelle runs. His mother Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) was one of the patients in a clinical trial that the company ran, and which Michelle personally oversaw, that went awry, resulting in Sandy falling into a coma. Teddy blames Michelle for making his mother sick, but claims it’s because Michelle was running the clinical trial as part of an experiment on behalf of her alien race. As Teddy’s accusations against Michelle grow wilder and bolder, Michelle seems to finally acquiesce: He’s right, she’s an alien. She’s an Andromedan, who have been interfering with the human race for decades, experimenting with human DNA with the hopes of helping humanity reach their ultimate potential. Sandy, sadly, was a casualty in this experiment. But she proposes a solution: the antifreeze that Teddy has in his car is secretly the cure for his mother’s ailment.
Teddy and Don confront Michelle with their terms for the Andromedans.
While Teddy rushes to his mother’s hospital room with the antifreeze, Michelle escapes her restrictions and explores a hidden room in Teddy’s basement, where she discovers that she was not the first person he’s kidnapped and dissected in his investigation into the Andromedons. When Teddy feeds the antifreeze into his mother’s IV drip and she dies, he returns to his house heartbroken, but Michelle is newly enraged. She demands of him, “How many Andromedans?!” before she finally reveals the full extent of the Andromedans’ meddling in Earth’s history, stretching back to the dinosaurs. Her presence on Earth was part of the Emperor’s last-ditch effort to fix humanity. And now that Teddy has discovered them, she’s willing to take him to their spaceship. The next morning they head to her office, where she claims the portal to the spaceship is hidden in her closet. But when Teddy readies himself to enter the portal, he reveals he’s wearing a suicide vest, “for insurance.” That vest explodes right as he steps into the closet, hurling Teddy’s head through the office and knocking Michelle unconscious.
“In some ways the ending is similar to the original film,” Tracy says. “In one big practical way is very different,” he says, referring, of course, to the big stunt of the explosion.
With Michelle supposedly free of her captor, it would seem like that’s the end. But Michelle flees the ambulance that picked her up, and returns to the wreckage of her office, stepping into the closet and ... beaming up to her spaceship. She emerges into a surreal, goopy spaceship bridge where the rest of the Andromedans greet her as their ruler. As she settles into her throne, the Andromedans ask her whether Earth is worth saving. She briefly contemplates the question before solemnly ordering the destruction of humanity. And the film ends with images of all of humanity suddenly expiring at the same time, falling where they stood. It’s a final note on the film’s interrogation of the best and worst of humankind.
“Maybe [audiences] can come to a few different conclusions [about the ending],” Tracy says. “It has a different kind of ambiguity baked into it in terms of whether you think it is a fitting, or an unjust, or just ending, or happy ending, or sad ending.”
How Does Bugonia Differ From The Original?
Tracy wanted Bugonia to be more focused on Teddy and Michelle’s dynamic.
For an ending that originated in a 2003 film, Bugonia’s ending feels surprisingly timely. Bugonia focuses more on current concerns about climate change and corporate corruption, while nodding at the mainstreamification conspiracy theories. That might be why the ending hits so much harder today than it might have 20 years ago, Tracy says.
“The ending of Bugonia is reckoning a little bit more with a very specific kind of political turn and hopelessness that we're feeling at the moment,” Tracy says. “And maybe probably as time has gone on and the climate catastrophe has felt increasingly urgent, and for some people hopeless, that that feeling of our relation to the planet and our trying to prefigure what the planet might look like without us and what our role is on this planet, I think all those questions feel much more top of mind ... The ending feels a bit more reactive around that.”
Lanthimos directs Stone on the set of Bugonia.
All the various changes that Tracy and Lanthimos made to the original’s story helped make the ending hit that much harder. The protagonist’s girlfriend in Save the Green Planet!, for example, was changed to Teddy’s cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), while a prominent police investigation subplot in the original film was nixed altogether. “It wasn't changing much about the story or characters or dialogue or even too much in terms of tone, but maybe just shifting a few things to make the script more specifically directable for [Lanthimos] and his style,” Tracy says.
The first major change that Lanthimos made, Tracy recalls, was to the title itself. “It was Yorgos who suggested Bugonia, which is a Greek myth about a colony of bees that spontaneously arises from the corpse of a cow. It's a nice mix of the gross and the beautiful, which I think Yorgos likes. And also seemed like it touched on some other things in a nice way.”
