‘Mickey 17’ Review: An Amusing Robert Pattinson Gamely Tackles a Double Role in Bong Joon Ho’s Scattershot Sci-Fi Follow-Up to ‘Parasite’
Bong Joon Ho has long been one of world cinema’s most original voices indicting the borderless scourge of late-stage capitalism, class polarization, climate disaster and the oppression of unchecked power. Using satirical allegory, broad farce, horror and violence, the visionary Korean master has made a string of standout genre films that double as subversive takes on sociopolitical rot, from Memories of Murder to The Host, Snowpiercer to Parasite, frequently making a virtue of tonal whiplash. Following his four-time Oscar-winning 2019 smash, the director returns in Mickey 17 to sci-fi, skewering autocracy and even attempted genocide in a pitch-dark comedy about colonization.
Or as Mark Ruffalo’s egomaniacal leader Kenneth Marshall puts it, an attempt to create “a pure, white planet full of superior people like us.” With much of the world swerving rightwards, the timing seems ideal for an anti-fascist comedy that uses recycled humans and uploaded intelligence as a springboard to target disposable morality and incursions into personal autonomy while still nurturing hope for humanity to heal itself.
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Based on Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, Bong’s adventurous new film barrels forward with chaotic plotting, as is often the case with the director’s work. But thematic coherence remains frustratingly elusive.
While a game-for-anything dual-role performance from Robert Pattinson keeps the English-language feature entertaining enough, the satirical thrust feels heavy-handed, as obvious as the Trumpian sneer planted on the sinister but buffoonish Marshall’s face or the red baseball caps on many of the gullible colonists he addresses. Mickey 17 just seems a bit trifling, which probably explains why release plans have been bumped around for a year.
Pattinson plays Mickey Barnes, who, after getting lured into a bad investment by his shady friend Timo (Steven Yeun), finds himself, in 2054, on the wrong side of sadistic loan shark Darius (Ian Hanmore).
Needing to get off Earth fast, the pair sign up for a space expedition to the distant planet Niflheim, where wannabe Messiah Marshall and his Lady Macbeth-type wife Yifa (Toni Collette) intend to form a colony which they operate like a religious sect. A raging sandstorm outside a departure terminal that looks like New York’s Guggenheim Museum suggests Earth may be beyond saving anyway.
While Timo has conned his way into a pilot position, Mickey has no qualifications, so he signs up to be an “expendable.” That means he’ll be assigned to dangerous missions in which survival is unlikely, starting when they land on Niflheim and he’s the designated air-tester, stepping outside the spacecraft and contracting a fatal airborne virus the minute he removes his helmet.
His body is then “reprinted” from organic compost, while his brain functions and memories are reinstalled from a hard-drive brick. As the guinea pig for development of a vaccine they need to survive, Mickey dies and is recycled many times over. But he still dreads the experience, finding solace only in the love of security agent Nisha (Naomi Ackie), who stands by him in every doomed experiment and every subsequent rebirth.
In a turning point already previewed in a prologue, Mickey’s 17th iteration crashes down an icy crevasse with the thermals and comms on his suit busted. Getting no help from self-serving Timo, he waits to die yet again, either from exposure to the elements or in the hungry maws of “creepers,” an alien lifeform that’s like some kind of large cockroach-caterpillar hybrid.
Ranging in size from babies around a foot high to hulking adults, the creatures look more goofy than menacing. When what appears to be the mother creeper drags Mickey 17 up to the surface and releases him, he realizes that the planet’s indigenous species means the settlers no harm. By the time he makes it back to the ship, however, 17 has been presumed dead and Mickey 18 birthed, necessitating subterfuge given that multiples are illegal. The more violent 18’s intention to assassinate Marshall doesn’t help them stay under the radar.
When a baby creeper is brought on board the ship and partially dismembered by Yifa — she’s like a futuristic Nigella Lawson, concerned about dwindling food supplies and obsessed with finding new ingredients for sauces — the creatures assemble by the thousands outside.
In another blunt riff on contemporary politics, Marshall hosts his own Tonight Show, by this point in full fascistic uniform. Seeing the gathering hordes of creepers as an opportunity for “glorious annihilation,” he announces a plan to eradicate them with a nerve gas they have been testing. He enlists his fawning right-hand man and videographer Preston (Daniel Henshall) to film his final pronouncements before launching the genocidal operation. Precisely what function Brit comedian Tim Key has as a kind of court jester in a giant pigeon suit is anybody’s guess.
Meanwhile, armed with a translation device developed by sympathetic science crew member Dorothy (Patsy Ferran), Mickey 17 defies Marshall’s leadership to warn the creepers, who have their own resilient means of retaliation.
The movie will no doubt have plenty of support among the auteurist faithful, but Bong’s storytelling, while undeniably playful, is also cluttered and messy, with too many superfluous diversions. It’s to be assumed that Ashton’s novel contained greater complexity, and while there’s a certain charm to the director’s irreverent handle on the material, as told here, the story just seems silly and the political barbs a bit toothless. The latter are not helped by feloniously over-the-top performances from Ruffalo and Collette. (Think Jake Gyllenhaal in Bong’s Okja.)
Ackie breathes unstoppable spirit into her role and Anamaria Vartolomei (so memorable in Audrey Diwan’s Venice Golden Lion winner, Happening) brings a welcome equilibrium to Kai, another ally against Marshall. But Yeun is less well served in a one-dimensional part.
Pattinson creates two distinct characters out of Mickey 17 and 18, delivering streams of voiceover in a cartoonish American accent for the former and imbuing the latter with aggressive volatility. Their attempts to kill each other are the closest the movie gets to tangible dramatic stakes. And there are notes of melancholy in Mickey’s reactions whenever anyone asks him what it’s like to die. Which is often.
Fiona Crombie’s production design gives the movie an imposing scale (with a Mar-a-Lago vulgarity in the ostentatious décor of the Marshalls’ quarters), though for a project shot by Darius Khondji and screened in IMAX, the visuals are nothing special. As usual for Bong, unexpected music choices liven things up, from quirky waltzes to carnivalesque riffs in a Danny Elfman mode.
While I was never bored during Mickey 17, I was often left wondering who it’s for and what it’s ultimately meant to be about on a thematic level. The dangers of replicating humans and the potential for unethical abuse of the technology are stressed in a dour warning by a senior official on Earth, played with fiery authority in her final screen role by the redoubtable Haydn Gwynne, to whom the film is dedicated. But the intriguing concept of recyclable people gets bumped aside too often in favor of a clownish take on the corruption of power. And we can see that any time we want by doomscrolling newsfeeds.
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