Bong Joon-ho’s follow-up to Parasite is an unwieldly beast of a movie, starring Robert Pattinson as a “bio-clone” who’s regularly brought back from the dead. Is it a satire? An allegory? Luke Buckmaster digs in.
Beware any critic who declares that Mickey 17 is good satire, without explaining what it’s satirising. Either the critic or the satire isn’t very good…possibly both. There’s certainly a feeling that auteur Bong Joon-ho—directing his first movie since Parasite—is trying to get at something, perhaps many things, in his strange and ultimately maddening sci-fi movie. Robert Pattinson stars as the eponymous character: the human equivalent of blank pieces of paper fed through a printer—an “expandable” bio-clone whose life, and death, don’t matter, because he can be reprinted ad infinitum. The titular “17” refers to the number of times he’s been resurrected.
One can imagine Mickey and William Cage—Tom Cruise’s protagonist in Edge of Tomorrow—hunched over a couple of whiskeys at a dive bar, gasbagging about all the times they’ve been thrown off the mortal coil, only to keep boomeranging back. Whereas Cage’s journey was snappy and video game-like, the live/die/repeat premise used for time-crunching and levelling up, Mickey’s is stretched out and zigzaggy, his character the one truly solidifying human element in a film that never walks in a straight line.
I like some aspects of it, and appreciated more, but it’s a long and lumbering affair, bloated as all get-out. I wonder how it’d feel at a lithe 90 minutes rather than a baggy and butt-flattening 137. I did however enjoy coming to terms with its peculiar futuristic world and dim-witted protagonist, who we meet, in close-up, with ice and snow stuck to his face, precariously positioned in a cave. Mickey’s buddy Timo (Steven Yeun) comes to rescue him, but, well, he’s awfully deep in that hole, and it’s going to be pretty hard to get him out of it…why not just go back to the printer? We learn, via some tangentially calibrated backstory, that the pair fled from earth after accruing loan shark debts for a failed macarons business (as you do), finding a new life in a space colony called Nilfheim.
Is this the foundation for a commentary on ideas espoused by tech bros like Elon Musk, who believe in technology as a means for literal escapism, a way to jet-pack out of a doomed earth? If so it registers in the vaguest terms; nobody in this film seems to think that they’re building a better life, or even a viable alternative. Is the community on Nilfheim being used as a microcosm of society? There’s an element of that, but this is no Snowpiercer, Joon-ho’s great dystopian action movie, which transforms vertical power structures into literal, horizontal spaces, set on a train whizzing around a post-apocalyptic world.
This aspect of Mickey 17 is less about social fabric and structures than the maniacal leaders at the top of the food chain: Mark Ruffalo’s quasi-despot Kenneth Marshall and his equally overbearing wife, Toni Collette’s Ylfa. Ruffalo is obviously doing a Trump pantomime, his voice embodying that horrible American whininess, his lips in a sideshow clown formation, every tic calibrated to reflect lunatic egomania. It’s the sort of performance that might’ve registered better had it evoked a recent but distant-feeling nightmarish past, rather than aligning itself (however unintentionally) to the current horrors unfolding in America.
Pattinson’s performance is strange too, deploying a high cartoonish vocal range that the actor has associated with Ren & Stimpy. This makes more sense when another version of Mickey emerges: Mickey 18, who’s a nastier piece of work and therefore must sound gruff and growly. The protagonist’s romantic interest, fellow crew member Nasha (Naomi Ackie), can’t believe her luck when she discovers her beau has multiplied, envisioning the potential for copulation enhancement. However the threesome scene that would’ve instantly canonised the film with cult-like status ends pre-maturely; the fantasies of Pattison superfans, seeing double, remain unfulfilled.
An important presence on the peripheries of the narrative are alien creatures called “creepers,” which are positioned design-wise between cuteness and grotesquery—the look of pattable sandworms. There’s some allegorical parallels to the treatment of animals and other life forms, but again the commentary feels rather hazy; this is no Okja. I was unsure, by the end of Mickey 17, whether the film had missed its satirical targets, or whether it never really had any.
