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Robert Pattinson lives, dies and repeats in Mickey 17 (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), the highly anticipated wacko sci-fi venture from master director Bong Joon Ho. It’s been six years since the beloved and acclaimed filmmaker won a pile of Oscars for Parasite, a modern masterpiece that’s pretty much impossible to follow. But follow it Bong must, his bolstered credibility as a populist auteur scoring him a fat $118 million budget from Warner Bros. to adapt Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, about a man who dies repeatedly only to be cloned back into existence every time. The film took a minute to complete, with Bong toiling in the editing room for an extended period (he had final cut, a topic of much pre-release discussion), and release dates were nudged and bumped, perhaps to its detriment. And it took another minute for the film to reach $100 million in worldwide box office sales, as it wasn’t exactly a smash hit outside of Bong’s native South Korea – but we all know that doesn’t mean it’s a lousy movie. It’s not lousy at all, in fact.
MICKEY 17: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: You will not be at all surprised to learn that, in the world of Mickey 17, technology continues its progressive march into the deeper recesses of moral gray areas. It’s 2054, and human cloning is a thing now. Not a legal thing, mind you, and that’s why icky politicians are doing the offshore-account thing and hauling their human-generating 3D printers into outer space to colonize other planets since – big shocker here – Earth is increasingly uninhabitable. Now we meet Mickey Barnes (Pattinson), a moron who partnered with Timo (Steven Yeun) on a macaron business that went tits-up (turns out macarons aren’t “bigger than hamburgers”) and put them in considerable debt to some real sleazebagganos who want to kill them. Not at all coincidentally, they’re in the market for a career change, preferably one that takes them off-planet.
So they sign up for an excursion to an ice planet called Niflheim, a venture spearheaded by failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a narcissistic attention hog with gleaming white teeth visible from Alpha Centauri and a similarly maniacal, grinning wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette). Both seem to harbor dreams of being authoritarian cult leaders, loudly muttering somethingsomething about starting a new, “pure” population of humans on Niflheim, a cornerstone piece of their ideological collage of repulsiveness, which also includes – another big shocker here – an omnipresent camera crew for Kenneth, who hosts some kind of dumbass talk/reality show for his followers; read into this as you may.
Warning: High concept pending. While Timo is competent enough to be a pilot for the Niflheim crew, Mickey’s slow-of-mind skillset finds him signing up to be the crew’s Expendable. It’s pretty self-explanatory: He does all the dirtiest work, and if he dies, his body is reprinted and his backed-up brain is downloaded into the fresh flesh vessel. E.g., when they reach Niflheim, they shove him out into the blizzardy wilderness to see if any deadly viruses are out there, and there is. By the time he’s done being the test dummy in the vaccine-development program, he’s the 17th iteration of Mickey – and since his personality gets a little tweaked with each cloning, Mickey 17 is a little extra dopey. Meanwhile, everyone likes to ask Mickey 17 what it’s like to die, so he’s in some pretty deep, uncharted existential waters. Is now a good time to mention the rule about Multiples? Namely, that there shall be no more than one iteration of an Expendable, or any human for that matter, running around at any given time? And that the punishment for this is – also not a shocker – termination?
Mickey 17’s drooling intellect isn’t a detriment to Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a kickass soldier who’s enough in love/lust with him to stick with him through multiple reprintings. One fateful day, Mickey 17 tumbles into a deep crevasse and is left for dead by Timo, who’s used to shrugging off Mickey’s deaths since they’ll just reprint him anyway. Maybe you can see where this is going. Mickey 17’s supposed to be devoured by Niflheim’s native giant-pill-bug inhabitants, dubbed Creepers, but no, the “monsters” actually save his dumb ass so he can wander back to HQ and find – yes, total shocker – the brash, confident and significantly less dumb Mickey 18 mashing face with Nasha. Uh oh.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Some have called Mickey 17 an amalgamation of Bong’s greatest hits, with the class struggle of Parasite, lunatic portrayals of corrupt leaders a la Okja and Snowpiercer, the creature-feature craziness of The Host and the live-action Looney Tunes slapstick of, well, every movie he’s ever made. The assertion is true, but is that a bad thing? It also conjures up the Groundhog Dayisms of Edge of Tomorrow – minus the time loop, of course – and the cloning conundrums of Moon and Oblivion.
Performance Worth Watching: It takes some considerable charismatic acrobatics to play different versions of the same character, and when Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 are in the same frame, Pattinson and Pattinson are funny, eccentric and electric. (Bonus points for Pattinson saying his characterizations were inspired by Ren and Stimpy.)
Memorable Dialogue: Nasha introduces Mickey 17: “This is mild Mickey.” Then she introduces Mickey 18: “This is habanero Mickey.”
Also, some irony via Timo: “Well, it’s nice knowing you. Have a nice death. See you tomorrow!”
Sex and Skin: A couple of bare glutes; horizontal smooching; a hand down the boxer shorts.
Our Take: Mickey 17 is an unapologetic Bongification of the tropes of dystopian sci-fi stories. Some of them are embraced (preening caricatures of despots, colonization criticisms) and some are discarded (preachy environmental messaging, survival stories) before landing on some cluttered thematics that find Bong rummaging around in a junk drawer of existential musings, the value of democracy and empathy, and the ethics of technology. The film isn’t revelatory in its subtextual musings, but it feeds the brain some theoretical food for thought – what are the psychological repercussions of dying and being reborn over and over again? – while Bong revels in his signature madcap tonal aesthetic, indulges ridiculous creature-featureisms and savagely lampoons serious issues (the poison of Manifest Destiny exceptionalism and the exploitation necessary to pursue it) in that if-you-can’t-laugh-at-it-then-there’s-no-hope kind of way.
While there’s no lack of vigor to Bong’s filmmaking – ever – he doesn’t always seem to have full control over Mickey 17’s increasingly unwieldy conglomeration of ideas, subplots and, to a lesser extent, visual set pieces (the narrative climaxes with an anarchic standoff between humans and Creepers, smack in the middle of a raging snowstorm, and it borders on bewildering). It’s almost as if the director threw his hands in the air and embraced the chaos, and/or resurrected the nutso energy of earlier films Okja and The Host. The film almost haphazardly kicks around a few half-formed ideas along the perimeter of its plot, including the proliferation of a potent drug being distributed by Timo, and Nasha could use a few more rungs on the ladder of her character.
Mickey 17’s loosey-goosey mannerisms are ultimately endearing within the context of Bong’s spirited approach to visual and narrative storytelling. The acting is across-the-board terrific, led by Pattinson’s inspired physical and vocal performances, in line with the eccentricity he showed in The Devil All the Time (he’s by far the best thing about that movie) and The Lighthouse. Ackie proceeds with a mischievous spirit. And Ruffalo and Collette indulge the almost too goofy, over-the-top cartoonish mania that Bong previously lured out of Tilda Swinton. All this, coming off the surgically precise writing and visual acumen of Parasite, feels like a slight regression for Bong, at the same time being ragingly funny, wild entertainment.
Our Call: Mickey 17 isn’t the best work from one of the current cinema’s great visionaries, but remember, mid-tier Bong is better than upper-tier work from, well, nearly everyone else. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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