‘Mickey 17’ Review: A Dopey Robert Pattinson Is Dying to Make You Laugh in ‘Parasite’ Director’s Disappointing Follow-up
While two Mickeys may be better than one, by the time you get to seven or eight (the idea of Edward Ashton’s sci-fi novel “Mickey7”), or a number as unwieldy as 18 (the inflated figure in Bong Joon Ho’s big-screen adaptation), the prospect of an endless supply of gawping Robert Pattinson clones really starts to wear on us. The “Snowpiercer” director is back in familiar territory with “Mickey 17,” a bonkers sci-fi satire set in a grim future where Earth is no longer habitable, other planets must be colonized and the success of a four-year mission to the ice planet Niflheim depends on disposable human copies called Expendables.
Pattinson has traversed deep space before, doing so in Claire Denis’ relatively elegant arthouse feature “High Life.” Here, the star dumbs it down to suit Bong’s big-budget grunge-topian vision, playing a sucker so desperate to escape a ruthless loan shark on Earth that he books passage on a missionary vessel to another planet, accidentally enrolling in the Expendables program without reading the fine print. Doing so literally means signing his life away, as Mickey 1 (the OG version of his character) agrees to have his body scanned and his memories archived, so he can be replicated — and recycled — ad infinitum, every time an unlucky copy hits a snag.
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That far-fetched premise should spawn a hundred plausibility questions — like, why is he the only Expendable aboard, and why don’t they do something more useful with that memory-duping technology? In Bong’s hands, it instead cues a bad-taste montage of assorted mishaps, which lead to dead (or almost dead) Mickeys being dragged to the incinerator chute and melted down for regeneration. Narrating in a wheedling Steve Buscemi-esque accent, Pattinson explains that each new iteration is made from salvaged waste — ashes to ashes, trash to trash — only to be spat out again on what looks like a giant 3D printer.
Bong’s impudent script underscores how little the human crew thinks of Expendables — and by extension, how little Bong thinks of human nature — through various gags, like the one where an oblivious technician forgets to put the gurney in place near the replicator, allowing a floppy, freshly printed Mickey to spill onto the lab-room floor. When a different tech trips over the plug mid-process, that hiccup may explain why Mickey 17 comes out slightly less self-loathing than the others. And yet, they’re basically all made to die, as Mickey is thrust into situations for which his crew mates’ lives are considered too valuable to risk.
Ergo, in order to appreciate “Mickey 17” — which Warner Bros. will release on Imax March 7, two weeks after its Berlin Film Festival premiere — you need to be comfortable with laughing at all the cruel and unusual ways Bong thinks to off him, from vaccine tests to sampling the air on an unknown planet. If that seems like a perverse imagination for someone peddling a fundamentally humanist message, behold the central paradox of Bong’s sensibility: Maybe he’s not quite the humanist his adherents believe, but more of a blunt and adolescent-minded satirist, operating in the vein of Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers.”
For bona fide Bong fans, the film’s hectoring tone and irreverent sense of humor should feel like a return to that strange blend of sentimentality and cynicism we saw in the “Parasite” director’s two previous English-language projects: gonzo meat-is-murder comedy “Okja” and full-throttle eat-the-rich thriller “Snowpiercer.” Alas, that’s not the register where Bong’s vision works best, and though it earns points for sheer oddity (and the nearly monochromatic, future-noir look established by DP Darius Khondji and production designer Fiona Crombie), too much of “Mickey 17” turns out to be sloppy, shrill and preachy — ironically, the same things that make Mark Ruffalo’s deliberately Trump-styled villain so grating in this movie.
Starting four years into the mission to colonize another planet, the film opens on Niflheim, where Mickey 17 is left for dead in an icy cavern, abandoned by Timo (Steven Yeun), the same pal who got him into this fix in the first place. The last thing the hapless Expendable sees is the gaping mouth of what looks like a giant woolly armadillo — Ruffalo’s clueless-leader character, Kenneth Marshall, has dubbed these vaguely Lovecraftian creatures “Creepers.”
According to the movie’s muddled ethics, Expendables were outlawed on Earth, but it’s fine that they be used and abused off-world, giving Marshall — a failed politician turned insecure prophet of the church-company overseeing the migration — final say on Mickey’s fate. For silly reasons, the law demands that there never be more than a single copy of a person in circulation at a time (the polar opposite of the “Star Wars” policy, where countless Storm Troopers are copies of the same compliant super-soldier).
Though Timo assumes otherwise, the Creeper does not kill Mickey 17. By the time the half-frozen survivor makes it back to the ship, his successor has already been printed — which means one of them must be eliminated. Even though their genes and memories are the same, each iteration has a slightly different personality. Mickey 18 is more aggressive, immediately assuming the alpha role to Mickey 17’s more submissive nature, which Pattinson suggests via his hunched shoulders and childish-looking bowl cut.
They both want to live, which pits them against one another at first. They also both crave the company of Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a sexually voracious rule-bender aboard the ship, who rather enjoys the idea of having more than one Mickey to satisfy her — provided that her rival Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei) doesn’t rat them out. And so the two women selfishly agree to share the rogue doubles, while Mickey 18 plots a coup.
This plot is easy enough to follow, though the film insists on making it more complicated, as Ruffalo’s character (whom he plays with wavy Colonel Sanders hair, bright white dentures and an inconsistent accent) grows increasingly tyrannical the farther from Earth his mission floats. Leering over his shoulder at every stage is his manipulative wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), who encourages his worst instincts — like the assumption that Creepers are a threat and must therefore be exterminated — while indulging her obsession with sauces. The pair of them recall the garish corporate fools Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal played in “Okja,” with their flamboyant costumes and over-the-top acting style. Bong might argue that our current reality is no less ridiculous, though it’s all just so exhausting.
In Ashton’s book, the author imagined 10 fewer copies of Mickey, but Bong bumps the count up to 17, gleefully putting character and star alike through the wringer. Pattinson’s an incredibly good sport through it all, subverting the image “Twilight” followers have of him by playing such a thoroughly pathetic character. For most of the film, he’s stuck in a “Groundhog Day”-like infinite loop, where Mickey’s forever doomed to repeat the same thankless life, all the while being pestered with insensitive questions about what it’s like to die.
As it happens, modern science already does a version of the underlying cloning technology, experimenting on small clusters of stem cells (rather than full-grown, memory-imprinted bodies). That approach spares the indignity of putting a human through all that pain. Does slapping Pattinson’s scowling face on the phenomenon lead us to see it any differently? For all the film’s recycled themes — from condemning the chasm between social classes to espousing compassion for all creatures — it’s not clear that any useful allegories are to be drawn from Bong’s darkly comedic parable. A single viewing should suffice.
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