Mickey 17
★★★★★ | Just the two of us
Expectations can kill anything. After director Bong Joon-ho swept the Oscars with his masterful film Parasite in 2019, the Western film community began to build expectations of the career he should have next. Naturally, director Bong refused to follow any of that, and his latest, a loose adaptation of Edward Ashton’s Mickey7, has been called a disappointment because of it.
Yet Mickey 17 is quintessential Bong Joon-ho from start to finish. It’s a farcical sci-fi melodrama that flirts with conspiracy theories, environmentalism, sex, and satire so broadly that in anyone else’s hands, it would fall apart in minutes. Not so here, as director Bong toys with audience expectations the same way he toys with his characters. Early on, we’re treated to a darkly comic montage of the ways Mickey (Robert Pattinson) has died to reach the 17th incarnation of his cloning process. Much later, after spending time with the characters, we revisit that montage. Only now, we’re no longer laughing.
Mickey 17 is set in the future, yet like all great satire, it’s really about the present. The Earth is coming undone due to the effects of climate change, and instead of working to fix it, humanity spends untold fortunes on ways to get the hell out of dodge.
One of these ships is led by Kenneth Marshall, a vulgar creature of a man who Mark Ruffalo plays as a kind of unholy mix between Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Somehow, people blindly follow his empty promises into the far reaches of space, including the hapless Mickey, who gets bullied into becoming a cloned expendable — a human guinea pig of sorts.
The film sets up simple rules: Only one identity can exist, and in the cases of multiples, both the original host and their clones will be killed.
Years later, the colony arrives at their chosen planet, and Mickey once again falls to a certain death. Only this time he survives, and by the time he finds his way back home, he’s already been cloned, and Mickey 18 is no pushover.
What makes Mickey 17 such a treat is how slyly director Bong works his magic. He pulls us in with the spectacle and intentionally keeps the texture in the background. Watch, for example, how little we’re told about the world left behind, yet how well we understand its intricacies by the end. Marshall is a monstrosity, but it’s clear he’s a product of a system disinterested in the horrors it creates. There are sub-cultures within sub-cultures on the colony ship. We get the sense that, if left up to our own devices, humans will create complexity where there is none. It’s our nature to obfuscate things to keep ourselves busy.
Then there’s Mickey, who remains in Bong’s hands a childlike victim of systemic greed. It’s always unclear who Mickey is, as we only meet him in his 17th incarnation. Even his memories are those that the company has remembered to back up in the cloning process. In a telling moment, we’re off-handedly told that every Mickey clone has a different personality, which raises a multitude of questions. Are they all just varying parts of the same identity? Does Mickey have a split personality? Or are they unique individuals with souls of their own? Before we can get an answer, Mickey brushes the thought away. After all, it doesn’t help him right now, and he’s got work to do. He has to stay busy, otherwise someone will ask why they’re keeping him around.
After the screening, I heard some mention how annoyed they were that the film didn’t explore this question further. But that’s the point. We’re so disinterested as a society that we don’t ask these things. We’re stuck in a rat race just to make it to the next day, how are we supposed to ponder the vastness of the soul in the process? Even as Mickey encounters an alien species on the planet, he can’t see them for the miracle they are. He’s got a quota to meet, and dying is such a chore to go through.
Mickey 17 plays like a mix between Okja and Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. It’s a smart film that plays up its ludicrous stupidity to make a point. Like Paul Verhoeven, Bong Joon-ho understands that subtlety is overrated. You have to swing a sledgehammer for people to notice. With Mickey 17, he delivers a powerful, nuanced, and deeply funny satire about who we are. In a way, it’s exactly what you’d expect from him.