Oh, Mickey
Bong Joon-ho’s first post-Oscar film is a perfect clarion call under Trump2.0. It’s just not a perfect film.
Mickey 17
Director: Bong Joon-ho • Writer: Bong Joon-ho, based on the book by Edward Ashton
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette
South Korea / USA • 2hrs 17mins
Opens Hong Kong Mar 6 • IIB
Grade: B
A new Bong Joon-ho film is always something to get excited about. Since he came flying out of the gate in 2003 with Memories of Murder – a comic grisly murder thriller? – he’s rightfully become known for his mastery of random tonal shifts, from dead serious drama to black comedy and all points in between. That’s a magic trick not everyone can pull off, though many try and fail. Maybe that stems from his obvious, utter disdain for capitalists and all their bullshit excuses for why they’re right and rationalisations for the mess they’ve put us in. Every time Jeff Bezos talks my eyes roll into the back of my head, so it’s easy to see where Bong’s gallows social humour comes from, especially for a guy from a place dominated by some major corporate power players.
So it’s also easy to see why Bong was drawn to Edward Ashton’s 2022 sci-fi novel Mickey7 and spun it into a caustic futuristic adventure that nestles nicely beside the awesome Snowpiercer. In Mickey 17, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson, still picking cool roles), signs up for work as an expendable – as marginalised as it sounds – on the exploitation-based human colony of Nilfheim, founded and lorded over by three-time election loser Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a fascist demagogue with shiny veneers. It’s the perfect set-up for a Bong-style class-conscious dramedy that for all its (accidental?) timeliness doesn’t quite hang together the way it should, or the way Bong’s best – which also count Parasite and The Host – do.
Two Pattinsons better than one
Under normal circumstances, the ones that made Bong a critical and box office champ at home before he set his sights on world domination and won some Oscars, Mickey 17 would have been made in the near-vacuum of studio-free space. Bong’s first purely English-language film had the geniuses at the suddenly anti-art Warner peering over his shoulder, and so given the film’s multiple delays the spectre of studio fiddling rises. That’s speculation, because it’s possible the dying vestiges of a studio that once gave a shit were trying to repair a messy movie. Mickey 17 feels unsure of what its story is and, more perplexingly, how to tell it. Bong’s been here before; in addition to his personal bugbears of late-stage capitalism and abuse of power he tosses in some scathing commentary on the legacy of colonisation, genocide, identity, reincarnation and personal autonomy to boot. It’s a lot, but even though wackiness and narrative chaos are the bedrock of Bong’s playground, starting off with Marshall expounding on a “pure, white planet full of superior people” is a bit on the nose, even for Bong.
The action picks up in 2054 on Nilfheim with Mickey 17, the number designation blue-collar workers are given for their constant reincarnation via organic 3D printer after their inevitable deaths, freezing in a crevasse. Mickey’s like an Amazon worker: he’s been used to test drugs, food and air, excavate dangerous caverns and do hazardous spacewalks as an expendable. His matter is tossed in the recycler, his memories are stored on a literal brick of a hard drive and he’s born again to do more grunt work so Marhsall, his vacuous yet controlling wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) and their sycophantic followers can live cushy lives. Making Mickey’s life a little less of a slog is his colony ship soldier girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie, Blink Twice), who has zero fucks to give about Marshall or his grand plans, and has one of the film’s best moments when she tells him so. Shit goes sideways when Mickey 17, presumed dead after his dangerous mission, makes his way home to find Mickey 18 in his bed.
Bong’s withering social critique is, as usual, crammed into a mash-up of body horror, farce, thriller and science fiction, and given a palpable grottiness thanks to gracefully clashing production design by Fiona Crombie (The Favourite, Beau is Afraid). The labourers live in dank, grey steel quarters – you can almost smell the axle grease – while Marshall and Co. live in garish, gold, plush surroundings; it’s very front car Snowpiercer. But Bong loses control of those patented tonal shifts too often for the film’s salient points about how wealth is built on the murderous exploitation or destruction of the less powerful – the working class or colonised communities – to land, and they end up a pulpy mess. The embattled indigenous creatures, dubbed “creepers”, are a bit too cutesy, Ruffalo’s OTT grimacing and Collette’s Lady Macbeth whispering are more exhausting than snarky smart, and (again) the Trumpness of it all is uncharacteristically clunky. Mickey 17 needed one more pass at the script stage to cut the fat out of the second act (really, we get it), find something for Steven Yeun’s Timo, Mickey’s bad news friend from Earth, to do, and lop off one of the many unnecessary endings. Still, it’s Bong, and Mickey 17 undeniably has its moments, most of them courtesy of Ackie and a super-game Pattinson, whose dual performance suggests a deeper exploration of the nature of self that seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. It’s not bad, it’s just not Bong’s best. And it doesn’t mean I’m not still looking forward to an animated film he’s making with Werner Herzog. Gulp.