Against expectation, Stone is at her broadest in the first act of the movie, before Fuller gets abducted by Don and Teddy. She sashays into boardrooms and stumbles while recording a video on work/life balance as if she’s in a Saturday Night Live skit about girl bosses. None of these scenes give credence to Don’s theories, but they do establish Fuller as an unlikable, out-of-touch rich person. Even the scenes in which Teddy and Don abduct Fuller are played for laughs, with Stone varying between precise martial arts moves and frantic flailing to escape her attackers.
As soon as she wakes up in Don’s basement to find her head shaved and her limbs in chains, Stone changes her approach. Initially, she allows Fuller to register some shock and confusion as she tries to make sense of the situation. Next, she plays a woman very used to getting her own way, as Fuller lays out, in very plain language, security protocols for Don and Teddy. Finally, after realizing that Don truly believes that she is an alien, she plays sympathetic and understanding with him, even as she insists that he’s wrong.
In the span of five minutes, Stone gives her character three different communication styles. But none of them goes over the top, none of them involves the easy hysterics that a lesser actor would use when playing an abductee. Instead, she keeps playing real, playing it like she’s a human interacting with humans—which is the entire point of the movie, even if it’s not the point of the scene.
Compassion in the Chaos
As in the original Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia ends with a terrifying reveal. Don and Teddy were right. Fuller is an Andromedan, and she has been using her company to experiment on humans. However, her people were not, in fact, turning humans into slaves. Rather, Andromedans created humans in their image, an act of apology to the Earth after accidentally killing off the dinosaurs.
As much as they hoped the humans would flourish on Earth and make it better, the Andromedans watched in horror as people destroyed the planet and each other. Fuller has been on a mission to guide Earth’s residents toward enlightenment and happiness. But they just keep acting like Don, wallowing in hatred and fear.
After a wonderfully retro sequence in which Fuller returns to her ship, declares the Earth experiment a failure, and pops the atmosphere, we’re treated to shots from all around the world, all immediately dead after Fuller’s actions.