Bong Joon-ho, director of Parasite, is back and returns to sci-fi with the satirical Mickey 17. But, in upscaling his vision to Hollywood blockbuster proportions, the trail-blazing Korean director sacrifices edge and poignancy, writes Rory Doherty.
The future does not look bright from Bong Joon-ho’s point of view—but you probably knew that before you check out Mickey 17, his darkly comic satire on space colonialism that kills Robert Pattinson 16 times before the story begins. Bong’s graduate short Incoherence zeroes into the private misbehaviours of three male professionals disrupted a respectable social order; Memories of Murder amplifies the incompetence of ‘80s Hwaseong detectives failing to solve serial femicides; Parasite stages a failed attempt at social mobility that pits members of the same underclass against each other, pointing them downwards beneath the foundations of wealthy homes.
Bong’s films identify a social fault (one that characters are not wholly responsible for) and apply pressure to it—how far will someone go to restore a reputation or disprove an assumed worthlessness?—but they have complicated feelings about individual ability to affect the world around them. You may be able to find peace and stability now, his films argue, but what about beyond this new equilibrium? What about the future?
In The Host, the conspiracy to disguise corporate responsibility behind the vengeful river monster is exposed, and a mismatched but tight-knit family enjoys safety and unity despite losing loved ones. In Snowpiercer, the beanie-wearing revolutionary Curtis (Chris Evans) is about to take control of the perpetual-motion engine that powers both the train and the oppression he suffers inside it, and he sacrifices so humanity can survive beyond the determined trajectory of the railway tracks—even if only two survive. And in Okja, Bong’s bizarre and tragic family film, a young Korean girl (Ahn Seo-hyun) is reunited with her genetically-engineered “superpig”, but both owner and pet must turn their back on the flocks of animals awaiting slaughter. Even these three adventure-tinted films are unwilling to make false promises of hope about society’s ills being mended.
It’s not to say his films have entirely avoided convenient saving graces (Okja features a deus ex machina golden pig) or clumsy climaxes (Ed Harris turns up in Snowpiercer to solely deliver exposition), but they work because the lingering tension sits side-by-side with the earned but imperfect catharsis. There is something about Mickey 17 that feels at odds with Bong’s allergy to neat, affirming storytelling. The story concerns a human replication device that can only “reprint” a person’s body (containing all the memories of their last neuro-backup) once the previous version is dead—tech that reprints (and reprints) Mickey Barnes (Pattinson), a squeaky-voiced loser who signs up to be an “expendable” on an interstellar colonial mission to escape Earth’s loan sharks as soon as possible.
It’s an attractive premise for Bong’s brand of tightly orchestrated slapstick, with plenty room to apply a coat of ironic existential panic to the mundanity of a crap job, but the story is not originally Bong’s—Mickey 17 is adapted from a novel by American author Edward Ashton (titled “Mickey7”—that’s 10 less Mickeys). Mickey the 17th soon finds himself in an interstellar powder keg after a new, meaner version of him is printed before anyone confirms 17 has died, and the Multiple Mickeys must collaborate to thwart their fascist, self-obsessed leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, basically doing Trump) wiping out the wriggly, tardigrade-like native inhabitants of their icy new planet.
But somewhere between the stuttering narrative momentum and the project’s massive scale and resources (budgeted around $118 million), the focus and clarity of how Bong diagnoses social and political malaise has been compromised—a flaw that’s exasperated by Mickey 17 refusing to complicate its planetary colonialism story beyond what we expect from an episode of Star Trek or Doctor Who.
Still, you won’t find Robert Pattinson on a list of Mickey 17’s faults. The incumbent Batman relishes the opportunity to be treated like a ragdoll for two hours: he’s dropped, tossed, maimed, zapped, poisoned, and incinerated with an increasing existential numbness. It’s not a pleasant life by any means—the joy of having a forthcoming but affectionate girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) is countered by his manipulative and selfish best friend Timo (Steven Yeun)—but what irritates Mickey most are the ignorant, invasive inquiries of, “What’s it like to die?” It’s an especially tone deaf question seeing as these same people don’t treat him as anything but disposable—Bong and Ashton recognize that, within a rigid capitalist structure, immortality is only a blessing if you have a say in how it is used, otherwise it’s ripe for exploitation.
Mickey 17 is full of expert line deliveries, physical comedy punchlines, and the tonal whiplash of snark and heart that Bong has carved a niche in, but after Mickey 17.0 is cucked by his new “multiple”, the film starts stumbling with increased frequency. More than once, the film resolves an exciting source of conflict to leap forward to the next act. We rush over key promises of the premise (why emphasise how the multiple Mickeys could coexist in secret if you’re not going to show it?), instead lingering in static scenes packed with too much dialogue that either belabours plotting or the same few character tenets. At 135 minutes, Bong extends his film’s lifespan just to make costly errors again and again.
By the third act, Mickey 17 careens towards its conclusion with a distracted, clumsy energy, and Bong neglects the irony and calculated emotions of the film’s first half. Instead, the final scenes are weirdly bureaucratic and unconvincingly existential—and the lingering, ambiguous sense of incompleteness feels like an obligatory shoe-in rather than a natural facet of the story. Parasite, Mother, Snowpiercer: these are films with a clear and escalating trajectory with idiosyncratic indulgences on top of rock-solid storytelling. Bong has made a career of gripping his audience, making them lean in and whip back in surprise—in upscaling his vision to Hollywood blockbuster proportions, the trail-blazing Korean director sacrifices edge and poignancy.
