Netflix addicts made a big hit out of the dystopian streaming series Squid Game, in which financially desperate contestants fight to the death in a twisted game show for the entertainment of shadowy billionaires. How bleak must life in South Korea be under late-stage capitalism to enable an idea like that? Now – in his first film since winning the Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay for 2019’s Parasite – South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho dispenses his own take on the premise of “expendable” people used up and tossed out to enrich the social elite.
All of Bong’s films are an intoxicating hybrid of violent action, political commentary, and absurdist comedy, alternating between strains of dank neo-noir thrillers like Memories of Murder or Mother, and potent science fiction satire like The Host or Snowpiercer. I was stoked to hear that Bong was returning to sci-fi for his new Hollywood-produced film: an adaptation of the American novel Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton, cranked up to 17 for the screen.
Mickey 17 takes place in a near future that might as well be the same world as Squid Game. Fleeing Earth to escape a murderous loan shark, Mickey Barnes (played by Robert Pattison in another of his offbeat post-Twilight roles) agrees to become an “expendable” in order to earn a seat on a space-colonization mission led by a clueless politician-turned-televangelist. As an expendable, Mickey has his memories backed up on a hard drive “brick” so they can be re-uploaded to a newly printed clone body every time he dies doing dangerous work. He’s basically a human lab rat and coal-mine canary. Even his best friend Timo (Steven Yeun, of The Walking Dead and Minari) doesn’t seem to give much thought to letting Mickey die.
It’s a premise ripe for social satire, and it generates a hilariously dark comic montage of Mickey being killed and recycled 16 times, but the scientific and philosophical questions raised by the cloning technology are never fully explored. Ex hypothesi, there is only one Mickey who keeps coming back from death, but for some reason it seems that each clone has its own personality. Dramatically this allows Pattinson to play around with several fun variations of the Mickey character, each with his own silly voice. The Mickey 17 variant is a lovable loser, a schlub even, though one who still looks like Edward Cullen and still effortlessly gets the girl.
I guess giving each clone a distinct character is meant to suggest that each copy of Mickey has a unique “soul” or moral value. That implication gives the story satirical bite in that the colonists are literally murdering their lower-class laborers over and over. But with the rules left hazy, the dramatic and emotional weight of the story doesn’t land as well as the satire.
I did enjoy the unusual romance between Mickey and his girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie of The End of the F***ing World and Blink Twice — recently reviewed here), a horny security officer who seems equally turned on by all the Mickey variants.
And I got a kick out of the wacky villain performances by Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette as the cartoonishly evil Elon Musk-ish Kenneth Marshall and his Lady Macbeth-ish wife Ylfa. In a hilarious if not very subtle takedown of capitalism’s bizarre relationship with White Christian nationalism, Marshall is obsessed with establishing a new human colony to preserve the human race on a “pure world.” The scene of the couple praying at a dinner party had the audience in my theater roaring with laughter.
In contrast to his intricately plotted crime movies, Bong’s sci-fi movies tend to be less rigorously thought out. The upside to Bong’s characteristic looseness with the sci-fi elements is that you never know what might happen next — like when one Mickey clone is left for dead in an ice cave and is instead taken by aliens who look like fur-covered roly-poly pill bugs. (In a miracle of production design, these “creepers” are somehow simultaneously skin-crawlingly gross and adorably cute. They’re not as lovable as the title creature in Bong’s Okja, but they generate as much audience empathy.)
Keeping things off-kilter, the plotting is sort of nonlinear, but in a paradoxically straightforward way. Bong occasionally interrupts the narrative in order to fill in the worldbuilding with flashbacks that explain various aspects of the technology, or politics of the sci-fi setting, almost like extended footnotes. The story wasn’t as unpredictable as most Bong films, but it kept me interested and entertained.
I thought Bong’s Parasite was one of the best movies of the 21st century so far – wickedly smart, politically astute, aesthetically excellent, and above all entertaining as hell – and I definitely left Mickey 17 feeling a little bit high, but I hope it doesn’t harsh your buzz too much to hear that this new Bong is filled with some weak-ass schwag.
