SPOILER WARNING!
When I recently watched Bugonia in theaters, it felt impossible not to read the whole thing as a climate-change parable that finally stops pretending humans are the heroes of the story. Teddy thinks Michelle’s company is literally killing the bees as part of an alien plot, which sounds like pure conspiracy at first, but the film quietly confirms that the true planetary threat is not some hidden sci-fi device. It is the world we already live in: Michelle’s Andromedan monologue points straight at climate change, war, and human violence as the forces destroying Earth long before any mothership arrives. The bees become a simple, loaded symbol: if they are collapsing, whole ecosystems are collapsing too.
That is why the final sequence lands so hard as a climate metaphor. Once Michelle reaches the Andromedan ship and drops the clear dome over the model Earth, every human on the planet simply shuts off, falling where they stand while everything else remains untouched. There is no exploding planet, no scorched biosphere, just a sudden absence of us. The last images linger on human bodies frozen in place and then cut back to Teddy’s apiary, where the bees begin to return. It is a brutally tidy reversal of the usual “save the Earth” arc: the only intervention that actually stabilizes the environment is one that removes the species that keeps insisting it will fix things someday.
For me, that ending recasts everything that came before as a joke with a bitter punchline. Teddy’s conspiracy fantasies, the pharma optics, even the alien royal court all turn out to be less important than the simple ecological truth the film stages at the end. The planet does not need us to survive; we need the planet, and we have been acting as if the opposite were true. When the bees come back to life in a world emptied of people, Bugonia imagines climate “recovery” that does not center human redemption at all. It is funny in the darkest possible way: the film gives us the apocalypse and then quietly asks whether, from the point of view of the Earth, this might actually be the first good decision anyone has made in a very long time.
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