Another One
By Dan Schindel
Mickey 17
Dir. Bong Joon-ho, U.S., Warner Bros.
For Bong Joon-ho, each film is like a new toy for playing with genre and jabbing at social ills. His explorations of government brutality and incompetence, debt and inequality, and class, and their effects on family and community dynamics have played out through the serial killer thriller (2003’s Memories of Murder), the monster movie (2006’s The Host), the murder mystery (2009’s Mother), and home invasions (2019’s Parasite). His international co-productions (three of his most recent four features) have seen more mixed receptions critically and commercially. His latest, Mickey 17, is a frustrating, messy mix of Bong’s usual formal cunning, playful character work, and missed opportunities.
Robert Pattinson plays the title character, the 17th iteration of Mickey Barnes, who in a spacefaring future is compelled by his onerous debt to escape Earth on an interstellar colonization mission to an icebound world. Lacking any specialized skills, he signs up to be the mission’s “expendable”—he takes on all the most dangerous jobs, occasionally even acting as a test subject for alien pathogens or nerve gas, and each time he dies, he’s replaced with a clone that has all his memories. A snafu arises when a run-in with the ice planet’s native “creeper” population (giant burrowing grubs that look like a cross between the mutated frog-beast from The Host and the super-pigs of 2017’s Okja; I love them) leaves Mickey presumed rather than actually dead. When he returns to base, a new clone has already been printed. Since “multiples” are verboten, Mickeys 17 and 18 try to keep their secret with the help of his/their girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie), all while the colony’s bombastic leader, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), agitates for war with the creepers.
Resonant science fiction weaves its speculative concepts organically into a narrative. Bong’s Snowpiercer (2013) constructs an allegory for class, revolution, and the persistence of systems into its downtrodden characters’ relentless forward march to take over a train chugging through a post-apocalyptic future. The train is its own self-contained ecosystem, and the film likewise loops its constituent lore, imagined tech, and character arcs within itself, trundling toward a devastating yet faintly hopeful conclusion. In Mickey 17, by contrast, many promising ideas are offered and then discarded. Near the beginning, Marshall expresses a fixation on the colonists conserving calories to survive their long journey, even forbidding sexual relationships because of this, only for the former proposal to be referred to just once more and the second not at all. Characters are introduced before vanishing for long enough that that viewer may have forgotten about them when they reappear. Steven Yeun, playing Mickey’s frenemy Timo, and the subplot around him, could have been removed without affecting the plot much. (Though it remains interesting that Yeun, often cast in American productions as sensitive, sometimes emotionally repressed men, continues to play cocksure, often sinister bros in films led by Korean directors like Bong and Lee Chang-dong.)
More disappointing is how disinterested the script seems in its own conceit. Edward Ashton’s original novel is titled Mickey7 and intersperses the main storyline with flashbacks to each of Mickey’s deaths. As the name change suggests, Bong has added deaths to the protagonist’s tortured existence, yet the audience only sees about half of them. Mickey’s lived experience embodies the previously theoretical/philosophical concept of reincarnation, but this is barely touched upon beyond his belief that he’s being punished for a past sin—another of the many good ideas left underdeveloped. The premise also is an apt metaphor for the dehumanization of the extractive capitalist, imperialist machine, but the film doesn’t show enough of Mickey as a worker to extract a coherent message. It doesn’t even preserve the book’s plot about the two Mickeys maintaining the charade that they’re one person, foreclosing some highly entertaining shenanigans, along with any exploration of fractured selfhood and how they respond to others’ perceptions of them. The story, strangely, could have largely played out the same without the cloning element.
Mickey 17 instead takes shape as a clumsy attempt to grapple with the global rise of authoritarian leaders, with Ruffalo mixing the mannerisms and qualities of figures ranging from Trump (he keeps his voice nasal and is constantly baring his teeth), to Mussolini (jutting his jaw, slicking back his hair when he wants to go to war), to Park Geun-hye (he has a religious soothsayer constantly at his shoulder). Marshall’s supporters among the crew wear red baseball caps, in case there was any ambiguity. But this roman à clef lacks any bite, arriving in theaters already feeling dated. Part of Marshall’s backstory is that he’s leaving Earth because he’s washed up as a politician, having lost his last two elections, and another character sneers at him over this in an applaud-now moment. Given the political fortunes of his most notable real-life analogue, it fails to land.
This shagginess is a sharp contrast to how Bong’s films typically build momentum and tension. The subplots here pile up so badly that they’re resolved in a checklist manner during an epilogue, with one major character announced to have died offscreen. It's unclear how many of these problems stem from Bong getting lost in the weeds spending a post–Best Picture blank check versus studio interference from Warner Bros. He has insisted that the final cut was his, but its extremely long release delay, myriad whispers about the production, and the sheer disarray of the edit belie this assertion. In one flashback scene, Mickey’s voiceover states twice in a row that it was the first time he met Nasha, which seems like a mistake.
Nevertheless Mickey 17 engages, thanks to Bong’s formal energy (of particular note is the repeated and deliberate use of point of view shots, an appropriately video-gamey aspect that also emphasizes the idea of clashing selfhoods between the disparate Mickeys) and the cast’s enthusiasm. Responses have varied regarding how much the director has tended to draw cartoonishly exaggerated performances from his non-Korean actors, with Tilda Swinton in Snowpiercer and Jake Gyllenhaal in Okja being standouts. (Ruffalo and Toni Collette both easily out-ham them here, the latter playing Marshall’s equally devious wife.) While many blockbusters value verisimilitude to the point where characters are aggressively normal even in the most ridiculous situations, Bong refreshingly feels no such constraint. Pattinson, continuing his post-Twilight crusade to subvert his teen heartthrob image, plays Mickey like vermin trapped in human form. He hunches, shirks, skulks, cowers, and affects a gravelly voice originally modeled after Jackass pratfaller Steve-O. While the screenplay might not properly evince the feeling of being an expendable, Pattinson perfectly portrays someone who has thoroughly internalized their mortality.
Bong’s pervious ventures into English-language filmmaking have actively engaged with their internationality, dramatizing the communicative difficulties between their characters. In Snowpiercer, Song Kang-ho uses a translator to speak with the rest of the cast; the editing gradually elides the device’s tinny voice until he appears to converse with them without any hiccup. The eventual camaraderie facilitated by the tech is woven into the film’s form. In Okja, the young Korean protagonist’s quest to reunite with her beloved super-pig is stymied by her inability to understand English. To communicate with a group of would-be allies, she relies on a bilingual character (another Steven Yeun role), who lies to them about her willingness to go along with their plans. In one elaborate joke, the English subtitles claim that he tells her in Korean to learn English, when in fact he’s just saying his name. Later, chastened and seeking redemption, he returns bearing a tattoo reading “Translations are sacred.” For Bong, venturing abroad is not merely a chance to work with higher budgets and foreign movie stars but a way to test how disparate groups experience—and resolve—friction.
The theme reappears in Mickey 17, even though here all the humans speak English. One of the lovelier details of Mickey and Nasha’s relationship is a code of shorthand they develop wherein letter/number combinations designate various sex positions, a way for them to speak only to each other in overcrowded conditions. Late in the plot, a translator that very much resembles the one from Snowpiercer is developed to help the colonists speak with the creepers, and the climax centers around a halting negotiation rather than a big battle (no matter how much the antagonists may desire one). Though there are some action beats involved, that emphasis on making peace rather than war is another way for Bong to go against the grain of blockbuster sci-fi.
Reflecting on Parasite’s massive international success, Bong speculated that its broad appeal was because “We all live in the same country, called capitalism.” While his international efforts have tried to render this condition through different fantastical scenarios, the fact that one of his Korean films drew a greater audience than any of them demonstrates how specificity of character can transcend language barriers and borders even more effectively. Translations are sacred, and well-honed cinematic affect translates fluidly.