James Y. Lee
Bong Joon-ho aficionados, arise! Five years out from making international cinema history with 2019’s Parasite—a film that broke 164 years of history at both Cannes and the Oscars by being the first South Korean film to win both their top prizes—Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 sees the director working with some of his highest formal refinement yet in relatively familiar territory. No, it’s not in the more grounded dramatic exercises that he’s created along the lines of Parasite, Memories of Murder (2003), and Mother (2009)—rather, the familiarity of Mickey 17‘s territory is in his heavily symbolic, occasionally humorous, sci-fi exploits, found along the likes of The Host (2008), Snowpiercer (2013), and Okja (2017), all of which exist in a very different kind of tonal frequency than the former three. But if there’s a kind of unifying principle that ties Bong’s oeuvre together, it’s the fact that he’s consistently been one of world cinema’s more forefront, mainstream anti-capitalists—which makes Mickey 17‘s existence as the maverick filmmaker’s first-ever Hollywood tentpole that much more fascinating to consider.
Parasite—among the most grounded of the bunch—told the tale of two families in opposite ends of the capitalistic food chain fighting for survival and influence. Snowpiercer took a more speculatively symbolic route, tracking a group of lower-class revolutionaries as they fight their way through a deeply metaphorical post-apocalyptic train of escalating pleasures and powers with each passing car. Okja, meanwhile, pointed its barbs at the cruelties of the meat industry, portraying the quest to save a genetically modified super-pig raised by a South Korean family from the clutches of an American-based conglomerate. And now, Mickey 17 sees Bong Joon-ho at maybe his most fiercely pointed and hilarious satirical bent yet, displaying the trials and tribulations of an “expendable” whose body is discarded and reprinted again and again and again for the purposes of an extraplanetary colonization effort.
That “expendable” is none other than Mickey Barnes, delightfully played by Robert Pattinson at his most eccentric frequency yet across all of Mickey’s different renditions. After falling into an unfortunate deal to borrow virtually un-repayable money from some of a rapidly-dying Earth’s most powerful loan sharks to create a macaron business with Timo (Steven Yeun), one of his closest friends, Mickey chooses to get the hell out of Earth and becomes an expendable out of sheer convenience. Simultaneously, a colonization campaign to occupy the ice planet Niflheim, led by populist politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo)—a character who doesn’t so much have shades of current dictator-to-be Donald Trump so much as he openly spoofs Trumpism’s most hilariously terrible traits, made apparent from the existence of emblazoned red caps on his supporters—starts to operate full steam ahead, and Mickey is brought along for the ride as a laborer in what Marshall believes will be humanity’s next manifest destiny.
Yes, dear reader, you understood that right—the “17” after Mickey’s name is an indication that he’s been died and restored a grand total of 17 times, 10 more than the title of Edward Ashton’s original novel, Mickey7. He’s been sent out to perform dangerous maintenance work on the exterior of a spaceship, deliberately catch a virus on Niflheim for the purposes of vaccine manufacture, and in his latest death as Mickey 17, fall into a crevasse of ice and be left to ostensibly be eaten by the creatures native to Niflheim’s ecosystem. Bong’s commentary has never quite been as sharply potent, or as implicitly horrific as it is with Mickey’s predicament. The film’s insistent commentary on how capitalist labor reduces workers’ bodies down to commodities to be repeatedly discarded is sometimes a consistent source of comedic relief in the absurdity of how Mickey dies repeatedly, but there’s also some stomach-churning dread to be found in how Mickey’s body is repeatedly commodified, put in literally life-endangering situations, and then incinerated to nothing, all by Marshall’s entourage’s will, only preserving his collective memories in a massive hard drive that’s literally contained within a brick. In this terrifying distant future, Earth has rotten to a point where people are actively making attempts to leave, and bodily autonomy is literally reduced and undignified for the sake of capitalist profit and imperialist expansion.
The saving grace amid all this is the relationship Mickey has developed across renditions with security agent Nasha (Naomi Ackie), whose romantic attachment is one of the core tenets of the film, and whose sexual connection is visually juxtaposed with a crass speech from Marshall about sexual intercourse while aboard the ship. But there’s one wrench in the equation that Mickey 17 doesn’t see coming—the creatures on Niflheim don’t kill him, but rather elect to save his life. And when Mickey 17 makes his way back to his quarters on Marshall’s massive spaceship, he realizes that he’s been presumed dead when he sees Mickey 18 on his bed. By law, two renditions of an expendable are not allowed to exist at once, and Mickey 17 realizes that if he’s to be discarded, it’s all over for him—the assumption he has that his own, current consciousness will wake up in a newer copy is wrong, and all of his experiences have already also been copied over to his 18th rendition. All at once, multiple fights immediately ensue; the fight between the Mickeys to preserve their personal integrity, the fight to colonize Niflheim as conflicts of interest start forming, and the growing resistance against Marshall and his band of colonizers.
Bong Joon-ho’s incredible penchant for worldbuilding and attention to detail does not dissipate one bit when it comes to the world of Mickey 17, ensuring that we get a sense of the legislative and political movements that lead to every major decision that occurs within the movie’s world, and also that we understand the kind of environment in Niflheim that humanity is intruding on. The establishment of the cloning system that Mickey routinely undergoes is established with airtight lines of logic while still allowing for substantial room to explore its implications in humorous and unsettling ways. In the midst of our modern American dystopia, it becomes readily apparent that Bong is aware of the kinds of political movements that would allow for a figurehead like Marshall to take office, and how he would exercise power with the help of his cronies and unwarranted control over his underlings’ bodily autonomy. Even the legal reasons for forbidding the existence of “multiples”—simultaneous copies of an expendable—are established with a briskly-paced, grim anecdote about a political officer who cloned himself and then proceeded to go on a homeless-killing mass-murder spree. And given that Mickey 17 is Bong’s first thematic foray into examining the implications of colonialism, as well as its-nearly-circular intersection with imperialistic and colonialist mindsets, it becomes natural that Bong offers up an empathetic eye for the way that the world of Niflheim works, as well as a deep curiosity for the denizens that inhabit it—which remains consistent, of course, with the empathy that Bong’s offered creatures like Okja in his past work…
… which elegantly dovetails into how self-referential Mickey 17 feels towards the greater movements of Bong’s career. Snowpiercer‘s class commentary shines through in the ways that Marshall and his wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), inhabit a luxurious, massive room that evokes a mansion more than a spaceship, regularly eating meats in a higher corner of the ship, while Mickey, Nasha, and other such laborers and inhabitants on the ship are sleeping in smaller bunks, worn down and with very little attention to maintenance. Okja‘s commentary on how natural denizens of Earth are violated for profit becomes more apparent in Mickey 17‘s Miyazakian midpoint turn, which also merges elegantly and paradoxically with the ostensibly alien grotesqueries of the titular creature from The Host. Even the house from Parasite seems to make an aesthetic reappearance at one point in the film—all of which contributes with firm conviction that even as this may be a massive sci-fi project from one of Hollywood’s premier studios, it’s still a distinctly Bong Joon-ho project.
What’s interesting about Mickey 17 is also the ways through which Bong’s Korean sensibilities—in politics, tone, formal construction, etc.—all shine through, even with this being his first project in which not a single character speaks a word in the Korean language. Anyone who’s been privy to the recent democratic turbulences of South Korean politics, with the recent impeachment of President Yoon Seok-yeol following a shocking and short-lived declaration of martial law, can likely infer that Bong’s ire towards the dictatorial presidents in South Korean history has not dissipated a bit. Perhaps most of note is the way that Ylfa regularly serves as Marshall’s de facto ghostwriter, checking him for the most optically sensible thing to say within his speeches, while also being just as vile as him in terms of unrepentant classist cruelty—which feels like a clear reflection of how the First Ladies of some of South Korea’s worst presidents, Yoon included, have often disproportionately influenced their partners, and how they maintain very different images from their spouses while still being in sync in terms of political objectives. Bong may have also been among the first modern South Korean filmmakers to ascribe noteworthily sharp tonal navigations between comedy and drama to other filmmakers from his home country, but Mickey 17‘s consistently smart comedy—ranging from expertly deployed slapstick to deliberately written verbal quirks—is a demonstration of how little his skills there have dulled, while also simultaneously being sincere and dread-inducing enough at certain points to really enhance what he’s going for.
A review of this film, of course, would not be complete without a mention of Pattinson, who faces what just might be his finest hour as the 18 different faces of Mickey Barnes—each of which inhabit some kind of different primary trait, a key distinction that allow the audience to easily track between Mickeys 17 and 18 as they fight for self-preservation, and a detail that’s also consistent with how the expendable-printing procedure works, as Nasha suitably remarks at one point about the different faces her relationships with Mickey have taken. What’s so astonishing is that Mickey 17’s neuroticism and Mickey 18’s single-minded determination feels so apart from each other, but Pattinson toes the line between making them indisputably distinct while also making it obvious that they’re all rooted in having come from the same “source,” making Mickey so charming to watch in whatever rendition he exists in, even as the defining trait he exhibits changes at any given point. Ackie provides the heart of Mickey 17, cementing its romantic elements by portraying Nasha as someone willing to do whatever it takes to keep Mickey safe while devotedly following his mission. Meanwhile, Yeun offers up a slimy charm to Timo, whose career as a rogue pilot that develops on his own exodus from Earth makes him a wonderfully performative scumbag at points, willing to throw Mickey under the bus whenever necessary. Ruffalo’s first attempt at a villainous role pays off in dividends, carrying over shades of a Trump impression to forge the image of a dictatorial maniac while making the role of Marshall delightfully disgusting in his own unique way—which synergizes perfectly with Collette’s more image-conscious Ylfa, a deeply venomous role that’s all the more sinister precisely because of the fragile front of civility that she barely maintains.
It’s deeply moving to be a filmgoer to have tracked Bong Joon-ho’s career for this long—and yet it’s fascinating to realize that the ostensibly substantial gap between Memories of Murder and this film is not really that much of a gap at all. It’s a tall order to expect Bong to match, or even surpass something as monumental as Parasite, but Bong Joon-ho’s response to those expectations appears to be moving forward with a very different lane he’s still confident in, naysayers be damned. It’s admirable to see how far Bong has expanded his own ambitions while keeping the heart of his craft and storytelling intact, a testament to his status as a real modern master who knows exactly what he wants, and whose convictions as a filmmaker hold fast even in the fact of changing pressures, environment, countries, languages, and genres. This is what it means to be a maverick—to be conscious of the work you’ve done so far, while still building on it in ways that are deeply meaningful and demonstrate a real control of the vision you want. With sharp humor, deep political insight, briskly expositional storytelling, a cast of delightful talents, and a wildly entertaining plea to preserve our humanity even in a growingly dystopian world, Mickey 17 defines, in a very specific way, how much Bong has held tight to what makes him such a delightful force to watch in modern international cinema.
