NATHAN WEINBENDER:
Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 is so titled because it’s about a guy named Mickey (Robert Pattinson), and he has died and been regenerated 16 times already. He’s a so-called “expendable,” enlisted by the government to join a crew headed to the faraway ice planet Niflheim. The plan is to escape a crumbling Earth and propagate the species in a new civilization, and it’s Mickey’s job to sacrifice himself by testing the atmosphere for radiation and airborne toxins and things like that.
When he dies, he’s literally recycled, a molecular duplicate of his body printed out from various substances, including waste from the spaceship. And now that he’s on his 17th go-round, Mickey is hoping that he can finally settle into a role that’s merely soul-deadening and not literally lethal. But then the crew makes another duplicate, thinking that the 17th Mickey died on his latest expedition, and now there are two of him milling about the spaceship.
This set-up makes up the first hour of Mickey 17, and it’s as loopy and breakneck as some of Bong’s best work. It establishes the plight of Earth, Mickey’s desperation to escape it, and all the logistics of life inside the ship, and it establishes Mickey’s relationships with his best friend, the two-bit criminal Timo (Steven Yeun), and his girlfriend, a ship security guard named Nasha (Naomi Ackie).
It’s a pretty typical dystopian scenario, complete with contemporary political parallels, but Bong confronts all the messy implications of “multiples” technology—political, sexual, societal. And he fills the screenplay with inventive asides, including the story of how Mickey and Timo got into financial trouble in the first place, and a darkly amusing tangent about a serial killer who duplicated himself so he could have alibis.
As Bong is wont to do, the second half of Mickey 17 sprints off in a different direction entirely. It concerns itself with Kenneth Marshall, the failed politician and aspiring megalomaniac who has bankrolled the Niflheim mission and who runs the ship with an iron fist. Mark Ruffalo plays Marshall with a Trumpian boorishness, his pursed lips barely fitting around his fake capped teeth, and it’s a hammy, obvious performance. Toni Collette fares slightly better as his ruthless wife, but they’re the least interesting of the upper-crust grotesques Bong has made into villains.
The plot also shifts its focus to the humans’ interactions with the only life form on the ice planet, these bug-like gopher creatures known as creepers. It’s here that Bong revisits themes involving animal cruelty that he previously explored in Okja—and surely the hierarchy within the spaceship was already reminiscent of his film Snowpiercer—and the spiky, potentially provocative themes of the film’s first half are flattened in service of an action-driven climax that doesn’t have much weight.
Mickey 17, which Bong adapted from a novel by Edward Asher, is biting off a lot. It’s dealing with the literal expendability of the working class, the consequences of colonization, the fine line between capitalism and free labor. It’s his first film since his Parasite became an unexpected box office hit and Oscar winner, and it’s admirable as a bold, eccentric vision on a blockbuster budget. But his attempts to break convention become weirdly conventional this time, and just as Mickey is himself recycled, Bong ends up reusing themes and images from his earlier, better films.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.