Off the heels of best picture wins alongside acclaim both in his native Korea and abroad, it’s clear that Bong Joon-ho has a style to indulge. You may have seen it in Snowpiercer, or The Host—borderline surrealism and dark comedy combined with social commentary that doesn’t so much comment as it yells at full decibels into the speakers. Still, you can get away with that if you manage to pull off everything else, and for the most part, he certainly has—Parasite had some most enjoyable genre-swivelling. The question is, does he keep it up with Mickey 17, or is it starting to get a bit stretched out like the titular clone?
Robert Pattison plays the titular Mickey—it’s funny to think that people once dismissed him as the silly sparkly vampire from Twilight, but hey, between Eggers films and Batman, it’s nice to see he made his own path anyway since. Here, he’s a rather hapless young man in a deteriorating future Earth who, after one mishap too many, signs on in desperation to a space colonization mission…as an ‘expendable’, meaning that he can be disposed of in the name of any reason his superiors see fit, before being printed out to to do it again. As you can tell by the title, said superiors certainly get mileage out of him.
The supporting cast certainly go all in on being over the top—we have Naomi Ackie going over the top as Mickey’s exuberant girlfriend, Steven Yuen returning from Joon-Ho’s prior project Okja, and, of course, we have Mark Ruffalo as the rather arrogant leader of the colony mission who’s also puppeteered about by his wife Toni Colette. Ruffalo’s character is a political-corporate demagogue with a somewhat inexplicable following of in this case literal cultists who all like reddish hats. Hm. I wonder who they’re referring to. Taylor Swift maybe?
The opening segments exploring Mickey’s situation and the gruesome humor about his place on the mission is enjoyable enough, leading up to things getting rather awkward with the cloning process—and while the film does touch on all the ramifications of such a thing…it all proves rather secondary surprisingly. In fact, one issue I kind of had was the film suddenly lurching around in pacing for a bit, as we go from sudden love triangles to awkward dinners and more. Joon-Ho did similar turns in Parasite, but as mentioned it was all done rather more skilfully and with some buildup there.
That’s not to say that there isn’t fun to be had, with Ruffalo turning in a memorable performance as a droning asshole, and Naomi even more memorably sticking to him—but if you’re expecting social commentary via the disturbing implications of callous use of technology…it’s not quite that. We do in fact end up with something oddly similar to Nausicaa…and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it might throw some people off just a little.
That leaves Mickey 17 as one of Joon-Ho’s weaker pieces that I’ve seen, though that doesn’t make it bad either—you’ll get your fill of deadpan scifi themed humor, and definite catharsis by the end. With a bit more evening out of the script—the film did suffer from recent Hollywood strikes that delayed it after all—it could’ve made it just a little bit more. And hey, it’s not like the theme of the future being left to the charge of blowhard idiots feels like it’ll get any less relevant…
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