Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 is just what you'd expect from the acclaimed director, a dazzling film. Robert Pattinson gives a career-best performance.
The master storyteller, Mr. Bong Joon Ho, is back after his wildly successful Parasite in 2019, to present Mickey 17, a sci-fi black comedy that takes place in space, but has the familiar comedic touch that’s distinct to Bong’s work. There’s a lot to absorb here, and it may take a few viewings to grasp all the avenues Bong has examined fully. Having said that, experiencing it the first time, the film succeeds in thoroughly satisfying that craving we seek from movies.
Mickey (Robert Pattinson, check out his Batman movie review) has run out of options on planet Earth and to seek escape from his woes, joins a space mission. Due to limited capacity and the avid fandom of politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo playing the version of Trump if Trump had lost the 2024 elections), it’s difficult to get a seat on the space shuttle. Mickey has no applicable skills, he says while narrating his story, so he decides to be an ‘expendable’, thus securing a seat on the voyage.
As an expendable, Mickey allows the shuttle’s management to clone him as many times as they want. He has basically given away the rights to his life and pays for this decision throughout. With the absence of death, his life has lost value and respect. He is used as an experimental tool, cutting out the middle man (rats and rabbits and such), and allows human experimentation.
It’s a miserable life with the exception of Nasha (Naomie Ackie from Blink Twice). A highly trained security agent with great promise, Nasha, for reasons unknown, takes a shine to Mickey. Mickey is special though, given that he’s the only expendable on their ship. People keep asking him, ‘What does it feel like to die?’. Despite dying 16 different times, Mickey never comes up with a good answer to that question.
The mission of the space shuttle is to create a new human society on a foreign planet. A committee that makes the decisions but their mascot is Kenneth Marshall. A vain puppet whose strings are pulled by his wife (Toni Collette) and Preston (Daniel Henshall, playing Marshall’s assistant or the devil that sits on his left shoulder spitting reckless ideas in his ear), Marshall nevertheless enjoys huge popularity.
You can’t fault Ruffalo’s performance despite the Trumpian affectations being hard to ignore and done to death. Playing a stupid man with a weak ego, he’s a bully who’s constantly bullied by those closest to him. He dreams of creating a pure human society on the new planet and gets so wrapped in his own ideas, that he has lost perspective. You can see Ruffalo following the same pattern as Sebastian Stan in portraying Donald Trump which is to own the character and humanize him. But in Ruffalo’s case, the performance may have been lost in the edit as he is used for comic relief, many times.
Pattinson on the other hand, is Mickey. Gone are the Twilight flashes that one used to get watching him on screen. Mickey is likeable on paper but Pattinson gives him a soul. When Mickey is reprinted a second time due to an error, Pattinson gives each Mickey a complete personality through his portrayal. Bong needed a white Song Kang Ho to play Mickey (so clearly can we see Song Kang Ho playing the character) and he got him in Pattinson.
They could’ve just shown Mickey go about his day and that would’ve been a compelling watch, too. But, there is a lot more to be found in Mickey 17. Social satire and commentary on the class system is a theme present in all of Bong’s movies which he perfected in Parasite. Here, Bong poses bigger questions like the consequences of who we choose to lead us. He doesn’t overwhelm you with drama in Mickey 17, preferring to keep things light.
Bong’s characters are cliched (aren’t we all?), but they are certainly more than caricatures. Like Arkady (Cameron Britton from Netflix’s Mindhunter), the head of the Science Team, who doesn’t entirely approve of the actions he’s asked to take but does it nevertheless to impress his bosses and satisfy the scientist in him. Nasha is trickier than others, however, and one of the joys of the movie is the unravelling of this character.
Mickey 17’s music is a character on its own with a symphonic, classical sound that gives it an operatic aura. Bong and his team strike a balance between the sheen of space movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Interstellar; and the grunge present in the Alien movies to further illustrate class discrimination. The best part is that Bong’s humour is not lost in translation and here, he provides a lighter touch than we are used to from his work.
When it comes out in a theatre near you, don’t miss the first stroke of cinematic brilliance of 2025 that celebrates the joy of watching movies.
Kai – ‘What does it feel like? To die?.’
Mickey – ‘It feels terrible, dying. I hate it.’