South Korean maestro Bong Joon-ho doesn’t hold out much hope for humanity in general. From his first feature Barking Dogs Never Bite in 2000 through to his masterwork Parasite his recurring themes are most of us are grist to someone’s grift. Mikey 17 is one of his broadest and most obvious social satires set in the uncomfortably near future, and though not his best work in English, it’s recognisably replete with his concerns about how we are living in the stupidest epoch – late-stage capitalism.
Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) as we encounter him is a meat puppet who unluckily signed up to be an Expendable on a colony spaceship owned by a Christo-fascist group whose “face” is the unstable egomaniac ex-politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his sadistic trad-wife Ylfa (Toni Collette). Bong doesn’t bother taking any pains to hide precisely who his Kenneth Marshall is modelled upon. A toothy, whiny, long red tie wearing man-child prone to tantrums and requiring constant handling by his assistant, Preston (a near unrecognisable Daniel Henshall) who looks a lot like a munted S&M skinhead. Marshall’s “One and Only” cult has scooped up the disenfranchised and the ‘elite’ on a mission to rebuild humanity on an ice planet named Niflheim.
Mickey 17 is the seventeenth version of a guy who wouldn’t be called the brightest crayon in the box. With limited opportunities on Earth, Mickey didn’t do much of anything except lose. He got involved in his feckless “friend” Timo’s (Steve Yeun) scheme to sell macaroons like burgers. Heavily invested and in debt to a loan shark named Darius Blank (Ian Hanmore) who likes his repayment in diced up flesh, Mickey has to get off-world, so he signs up for the Expendable program without reading the terms and conditions. Distracted by the smell of the intake scientist’s hair (Holliday Granger), Mickey placidly goes through the program until he ends up with a gun pointed at his head for the final brain splattering stage.
An Expendable is a bio-printed clone whose memories and consciousness are re-uploaded to a new body every time a version dies. Illegal on Earth, none of the ethical concerns apply in space where Mickey is a doomed lab rat for unchecked scientific experimentation and manual exploitation. “I’m being punished,” Mikey 17 laments as he narrates the circumstances that brought him to the moment we meet him surprised to be alive in a frozen crevasse on the colony planet.
Mickey is an easy target for the bullies on the ship and for Timo who managed to inveigle his way into a piloting position on the mission. There is one person who doesn’t treat him like human refuse, elite security officer Nasha (Naomi Ackie) who quickly becomes his girlfriend. For everyone else, he’s a moon-faced moron about whom they quite literally don’t care if he lives or dies beyond the question “What is it like to die?” The answer is “Horrific”.
Eventually the inevitable happens. Mickey 17 doesn’t die as expected and already a Mickey 18 has been printed and uploaded. Duplicates are abominations and only one Mickey can be alive at a given time. Mickey 18 isn’t the simple guy that Mickey 17 is. He’s pissed, violent, and remembers things differently to how 17 does. He’s not going to let 17 be the Mickey of the moment and the two battle it out for supremacy and Nasha’s affections.
There’s a lot of flab on Bong’s beautifully filmed and designed bone. Too many subplots and characters who don’t get fully fleshed out. There’s Anamaria Vartolomei’s Kai Katz, representative of an elite who signed up for the mission assuming she’d be treated as the best of the best who is shocked to realise she’s considered a prime genetic specimen destined to birth the new “master race.” The narrative folds back on itself a little too often in a manner that is mostly entertaining but sometimes obviously extraneous. The native planetary inhabitants, the “Creepers” who resemble big tardigrades with tentacles are engaging narrative McGuffins.
Uneven as it is, Robert Pattinson’s Mickeys are the main players in the unwieldy and roiling space satire, and it is difficult not to feel for the guy(s). Bong’s (loose) adaptation of Edward Ashton’s novel retains some of the philosophical quandaries regarding identity, memory, and individuation. The film is excessively “of the moment” and that can be both a blessing and a curse. There’s no application of reason to an unreasonable world that will make sense, and as such Bong employs slapstick shenanigans to highlight how blood curdling the world of the ‘future-now’ is.
Mickey 17 is a minor work for Bong Joon-ho, but it is consistently engaging and absurd, sneaking in its ethical and ecological minefields for the unsuspecting. There are strong acting turns by the supporting cast who include Thomas Turgoose, Cameron Britton, Patsy Ferran, and Steve Park. Anyone expecting Parasite or Memories of a Murder and Host levels of Bong’s genius will be disappointed, but those who liked Okja and Snowpiercer will be more onboard with Mickey 17.
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun
Writer: Bong Joon-ho, (based on the novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton)
Producers: Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Bong Joon-ho, Dooho Choi
Cinematography: Darius Khondji
Editor: Yang Jin-mo
Music: Jung Jae-il
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