‘Mickey 17’: If You Pointed A Gun At Bong Joon Ho's Head And Asked Him To Make A Box-office Hit
Let me preface this review by saying: I really liked the movie. I came out of the cinema buzzing and telling my friends this is the kind of concept directors should have before starting production - it's about time a dark, satirical sci-fi concept took over the big screen, especially after Black Mirror's creators stopped putting out new episodes (canonically because the current state of the world has everyone depressed enough).
Mickey 17 is director Bong Joon-Ho's newest, long-awaited film, based on the novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton. With a 6-year break after Parasite's release and a year-long delay (Bong originally planned for a March 2024 debut), coupled with the buzz around Robert Pattinson in a titular double role and the intriguing Wes-Anderson-esque poster, Bong must've felt the overwhelming pressure to meet expectations. Parasite was the masterpiece that it was because it did not cater to an immensely commercial audience, distributed by indie studio Neon and suitably art-house-styled for its message. Mickey 17, however, has once again proved that genius is inevitably diluted when shoved into the cookie-cutter mold of mainstream cinema.
The movie's concept itself is fantastic (with credit to Ashton): set in a near-future where Earth's resources are critically diminishing, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) signs up to be an 'Expendable' for a space colony that sets off to colonise snow planet Niflheim. With his memories and personality saved into a brick-like hard drive, Mickey is used as a human guinea pig - sent out to die again and again from pathogens, exploration injuries, and vaccine experiments, his biodata is analysed by a group of scientists to prepare the human race for inhabiting the planet, while a new, cloned body is printed out and inserted with the hard drive to create a new iteration of Mickey, ready to die again.
In true Bong Joon-Ho fashion, the heart of the film is a striking examination of capitalism and what it means to be human within a system that reduces human life to nothing more than labour. Mickey's desperation to join the space expedition stems from his inability to repay a violent loan shark, his dire situation leading him to overlook the small print that dooms him to his fate of torturous immortality. As an Expendable, he is treated as sub-human, with the intensity of his suffering downplayed by his crewmates into a never-ending interrogation of 'What does it feel like to die?' Even non-Expendables aren't free from this objectification, as we see expedition leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) attempt to breed Mickey and female agent Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei) to create a new 'superior', all-white race to inhabit Niflheim (to which Kai protests, 'Am I just a uterus to you?')
What I found most poignant in the film was its mastery in embodying Giorgio Agamben's theory of 'bare life': the idea that in 'states of exception', such as political or environmental crises, sovereign power is exerted through reducing the value of people to mere bodies. It is Mickey's reprintable body that is of value to the expedition, not his life or nature of being human. Agamben envisions these spaces of exception as functioning as a nation-state within itself, outside the full protection of the law; in this liminal zone, the rights of those at the bottom of the socio-political hierarchy (like Mickey Barnes) become negotiable, including the sacred right to life. Effectively, the inhumane treatment of Mickey can go unpunished and unseen because of its nature as an isolated nation-state, unreachable by the pre-existing laws and ethics of Earth's humanity.
The narrative is complemented superbly by Robert Pattinson's acting - a range echoing dual-roled actors like Nina Dobrev in The Vampire Diaries and Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap, I truly did not expect him to deliver an even more unrecognisable performance than the fit of low-throated squawking and rumbling he did voicing The Boy and The Heron (If you haven't watched videos of his dub, you should). Pattinson's role made the film; his wide-eyed ditziness as Mickey 17 was convincingly human and particularly moving in scenes where his naivety allows him to accept his harrowing fate, well-juxtaposed with the sarcastic brazenness of his clone, Mickey 18. Naomi Ackie was stunning as agent and love interest Nasha, and her confident determination made for a convincing femme fatale trope. However, I wasn't quite convinced of her loving relationship with Mickey, especially with her immediate acceptance and elation to enter a throuple with the newly-cloned Mickey 18 despite Mickey 17's clear reluctance. Mark Ruffalo was adequately irritating as the Trump-parodied expedition leader Marshall, although his filmography definitely warrants a complex role beyond the slapstick villain used for comedy relief. Toni Collette plays an unsettling enough Ylfa, Marshall's wife, whose strange subplot of being sauce-obsessed sat strangely with the rest of the narrative. A later scene shows Ylfa as genuinely horrifying, cloning Marshall in Mickey's nightmare sequence with a sinister smile reminiscent of Collette's chilling performance in Hereditary. Scenes like these were precisely what was missing in the film - ones that took themselves seriously and whose horror allowed the audience to interpret the director's message for themselves.
This is the main problem I had with the film. Cinematically, the tone and pacing were just strange, harshly conflicting with the originally brilliant concept that it ended up distracting from it. Every time the movie edges towards saying something meaningful, it interrupts itself with an annoying one-liner or another overused Marvel-esque trope. What could've been a darkly satirical sci-fi exploring how the value of being human distorts in the face of new technologies and exploitative sovereign power falls short of its potential, thanks to an exposition that takes up nearly half of the film, an abruptly resolved happy ending that undermines its political critique (by simply killing off the villain for everything to return to sunshine and rainbows), and a failure to present its message in the 'show, not tell' style that characterised Parasite and Memories of Murder. It is precisely how on-the-nose the capitalism critique was that had me sympathetic and horrified at first, then merely frustrated towards the end of the film. For instance, Ruffalo's evidently Trump-inspired mannerisms, his red-capped and riled-up followers, and an ambiguous religious counsel maliciously swaying his decisions all juxtaposed uncomfortably with the subtlety of Mickey's portrayal that effectively evoked pathos for his narrative. It seemed the film, in attempting to explore too many things in too many directions, ended up not saying much of anything in the end. Ackie's protests to killing off Niflheim's original inhabitants (Dune sandworm lookalikes named 'Creepers') and a later monologue screaming at Marshall for his crimes are powerful and well-performed but made me feel like I was sat down and taught a 'capitalism is bad' lecture, rather than getting a chance to see it for myself.
Bong also integrates a colonisation narrative quite smoothly into the main plot - using Expendables to eliminate Niflheim's natural defence mechanisms and incubating a kidnapped baby Creeper to develop a translator for communicating with the species cleverly entwined the scrutiny on both tech and politics. The vilified naming of the Creepers as a fearmongering tactic, and the passive reasonableness of the natives' sole request to return their kidnapped child, for instance, are great examples of the subtlety the film could've steered towards in critiquing colonisation. A poor example that the film actually went for was having Ackie scream, 'They were here first!' at a disinterested Marshall, whose verbal protests had no effect on any character, and were clearly meant to spell things out for viewers. Mickey 17 would've sparkled with a more put-together storytelling approach, similar to the colonial narratives in Avatar or Princess Mononoke.
I have mixed feelings about the film; I enjoyed it, it made me feel and think. It was entertaining enough that it kept my attention for the entire 2+ hour runtime, but it was just so unsatisfying despite its forcefully satisfying rush to tie up all loose ends and revert to a utopian state by the end. An open ending, Mickey stumbling into a duplicated body printer, or even a 19th iteration of himself, would've saved the film from being just another colourful box office hit, superseding the poignant, hollow endings of Parasite and Memories of Murder nicely. It seems Mickey 17 had all the right ingredients for a revolutionary film - a stellar cast, a fresh concept, and a director with a world-renowned flair for dystopian storytelling - yet in its ambition to mash too many big ideas together, amalgamated into the same cinematic mess that Avengers: Endgame became.
Edited by Humaira Valera, Co-film & TV editor
