It’s tempting to call Bong Joon-ho’s latest film, Mickey 17, a minor work. But only because his last film, Parasite, was a cultural and box office hit. It was a film so rooted in the human experience of living in the modern world that it resonated with audiences, as if Bong had been whispering right into our ear the very observations we had noted ourselves.
But with his latest, Mickey 17, Bong is looking forward to the future and, like many of us, doesn’t like what he sees. Or, more to the point, he can’t believe the future is that stupid. Mickey 17 is an anti-fascist screed uninhibited by anything so lowly as reservations, second-guessing, or subtlety. It is a big fat thumb in the eye, a full-throated raspberry to the corrupt, obscenely wealthy in power. Bong paints them as the fickle, vain, greedy, incurious monsters they are.
Mickey 17 is also a sincerely goofy movie. A necessary tone, otherwise, the dunderheads on display would appear cartoonish, even by the current standards of our real-life leaders. Instead, in Bong’s hands, the corrupt leaders in Mickey 17 come off as strangely restrained. Bong paints a picture of a future powered by greed, lust for power, and a special kind of amorality that makes killing a man over and over because it’s cheaper than training and hiring experts so grossly hilarious it makes me wanna cry.
The man in question is Mickery Barnes (Robert Pattinson). Thankfully, Bong doesn’t look for empathy in the venal posturing of the dimwitted Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) or his shallow and status-obsessed wife, Ylfa; they don’t deserve any. Kenneth is a failed politician who has found a second life by using his fortune to spearhead a spaceship to the stars to find a new planet for a purer race. A running gag Bong weaves throughout the script is how Kenneth and Ylfa sometimes say the quiet part out loud, “Pure….white.”
The future of Mickey 17, as viewed through Bong and Darius Khondji’s camera lens, is a look at how capitalism destroys everything beautiful. Like a drill, it burrows into the wondrous and extracts only the banal. Mickey 17 isn’t Star Trek; the Marshall’s mission isn’t to boldly go where no man has gone before but to boldly colonize where no man has colonized before.
Mickey 17 finds empathy in the workers. The grunts of the spaceship are known as “the expendables.” And few are as expendable as Pattinson’s Mickey. On the run from a loan shark, Mickey and his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) board the ship, reasoning that the vastness and unpredictability of space are preferable to the bloody and very knowable fate the loan shark has in store for them.
Timo talks his way into being a shuttle pilot. After all, Timo’s great at talking himself out of and into situations. Poor Mickey, however, is a hapless loser who signs up for the clone program without reading the fine print. The fine print is, ” You are no longer a person; you’re expendable.”
Adapted from the book Mikcey 7 by Edward Ashton, Bong crafts a textured and layered work. In a world where blockbusters do well to have one idea, Mickey 17 is overflowing with ideas and themes. While some of them never go anywhere, the ones that do, nonetheless, find ways to burrow into my consciousness. The story of a sweet-hearted goof who accidentally signs up for eternal indentured servitude has more than a few passing familiarities to our present times.
It’s all so horribly familiar that in anyone else’s hands, it might have been unbearable. But in Bong’s hands, Mickey 17 is unabashedly goofy, horny, and sweet. Despite all the grime, sweat, and brutalism of the ship’s lower decks, Bong leads us on a chirpy death march through this hellish landscape in space. Aside from all this is the way Bong marvels at the wonder of sci-fi, clones, alien creatures, and space travel, all while despairing at how capitalism is incapable of wonder, seeing all these things merely as tools, not possibilities.
A prime example is the creepers, a roly-polly like life form found on the planet’s surface. The humans consider the alien “creepers” to be merely stupid, cattle-like creatures and a possible source of food, but they are revealed to be highly intelligent and more human than we might have assumed. Another example is how capitalism’s narrow worldview is devoid of the joy and wonder of discovery or the desire for any sort of harmony.
A failed politician and egomaniac, Kenneth and his wife Ylfa treat the wonders of their newfound planet Niflheim and the ingenious tech at their hands with such disdain and shortsightedness that they are both a caricature of the modern-day powers that be and of a society that would happily consume these things without a second thought. It is a darkly comic fable told with a seething rage as Bong tries not to laugh at how absurd it has all become.
Amidst all this is Pattinson’s Mickey. I used hapless to describe him, which feels like an understatement. Pattinson plays Mickey with the elegance of a silent clown. Mickey is one of those souls whose life is so riddled with tragedy that if he didn’t have bad luck, he’d have no luck at all. Haunted by the death of his mother that he wrongfully blames himself for, dehumanized not only by the one percent but also the rest of the ship, he’s so used to being the Job of the universe that when the Creepers save him, he mistakes their kindness as an indictment on him being a clone.
One of the fascinating wrinkles of Bong’s script is how, until Mickey 18, all the Mickey clones have been relatively the same. But with Mickey 18, there’s a hardness to him, a confidence that Mickey 17 seems unnerved by. As if, a consequence of two clones existing at the same time allows for individuality to occur, making them more than mere replicas. Pattinson does a jaw-dropping job of playing the two Mickeys, finding humor and grace in the ways the two are vastly different and yet profoundly similar.
Throughout Mickey 17, Bong shows how authoritarianism corrodes society’s moral fabric, eroding the guardrails of human decency in the name of productivity and the bottom line. The other passengers on the ship, who are also grunt workers, look down at Mickey, unable to view him as a person merely because the powers that be do not. But also because it is better to aim your rage at someone beneath you who can not retaliate than aim it at those responsible who can.
Mickey’s status as expendable makes him expendable to everyone except his girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie). Nasha’s attraction to Mickey is almost a mystery until you realize the fact that he’s such a pushover is the attraction. But for Mickey, after 17 iterations, her attention is the closest thing to love he’s ever felt. But then a glitch happens, and Mickey 18 is cloned before Mickey 17 dies. The result is both humorous and profound.
Humorous because Nasha finds herself faced with a real-life version of a fantasy, a possibility of a threeway with her boyfriend without cheating. Mickey, for his part, comes face to face with the age-old adolescent argument of “Is having sex with your clone gay or an act of masturbating?”
Ackie, by the way, shows an untapped ability for comedic timing and a boisterous sexual side that highlights how little Hollywood has used one of the brighter stars working today. She plays Nasha with delicate fierceness. She has a scene where she cusses out Ruffalo’s Kenneth for his greed and stupidity, and can I say…man I needed that. More modern movies should have characters screeching at authoritarian figures, if only for my own peace of mind.
Khondji’s camera, aided by Fiona Crombie’s sets, gives Mickey 17 a tactile, lived-in feeling. In addition, they visually show the differences of class, with Marshall’s room being spacious and crowded with possessions in stark contrast to Nasha’s and Mickey’s room, which is a cramped one-room with a mattress inside. Khondji shoots Mickey 17 with a scope, showing both the scope of the ship and the desolation of the planet they’ve landed on.
Meanwhile, Mickey 18’s existence leads Mickey 17 to realize that death is real for him now. Before, knowing he would merely be cloned gave Mickey a strange sense of fearlessness, as nothing meant anything. But now, there would be no new clone for his memories to transplant to; his life is his own, and death is real with definable features.
Bong is a modern Ingmar Bergman. He is one of the few working artists who can communicate his themes and ideas through his films so clearly that even people who look at films rather than watch them can comprehend his meaning. Mickey 17 is more than a lark; it is the work of a man who feels our despair, frustration, and, most importantly, our hope.
Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
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