“Mickey 17,” Bong Joon Ho’s poignant, slapsticky, and goopy venture into the furthest reaches of our increasingly probable corporate colonial space future, is the kind of big-ticket swing that all Best Picture winners should be constitutionally mandated to make. After his triple Oscars win for the incredible “Parasite” in February 2020, truly the last good thing to happen before the world went bad and stayed that way, Bong could have taken his newfound prestige and cashed in. Instead, the renowned South Korean auteur decided to parlay studio money and cultural prestige in an effort to translate his unique perspective of whimsy, humanitarianism, and anti-authoritarianism onto the grandest canvas, much like his previous efforts using house money to make something profoundly sweet and weird with “Okja”. The film born from these efforts is “Mickey 17,” a dazzling yet baffling movie that should be embraced for its willingness to be kooky and kind in equal measure.
Adapted from the novel “Mickey7” by Edward Ashton, “Mickey 17” depicts a seemingly not so distant future, where a political and religious demagogue, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo in a performance which constitutes a hell spawn of Dr. Evil and Donald Trump), and his sauce obsessed wife, Yifa (Toni Collette), have taken their capitalistic and phrenological pursuits to the stars, hoping to colonize new worlds that might be more accepting of Kenneth’s preferred societal status as God King. However, venturing into deep space often leads to rampant death and injury from accidents, alien viruses, or even attack by the indigenous species of some far flung planet. Thankfully, back on Earth, a wondrous technology has been developed that can make a full carbon copy of a whole human person, complete with memories. While outlawed on Earth, where sickos began making multiples to commit murders while having stone cold alibis, the cosmos are virgin ground for all kinds of rampant exploitation of expendable new planets, species and, in this case, labor.
Enter Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), a poor soft spoken sap on the run from a loan shark with a dismemberment fetish, who chooses to become an “Expendable” on a four year colony mission. Expendables are meant to take the brunt of the dangerous tasks so that the other crew members won’t have to. Each time one of these tasks is required, Mickey steps in, dies badly, and then is reborn through what amounts to a human meat 3D printer. Soon, this process is taken advantage of, and Mickey becomes a human lab rat, being tested on to harness deadly pathogens or even develop bio-weapons. While he hates dying, Mickey certainly prefers short-term death to the permanent kind. Besides, he’s got a calorically precise allotment of freeze-dried food, a girlfriend who loves him for whatever number he is (Naomi Ackle), and his limbs are securely in their proper place. What more could a poor exploited worker ask for?
For those keeping score at home, this is just the basic setup for the film, detailed in a delightful flashback/monologue from our seventeenth Mickey as he is about to be devoured by a species of gargantuan Lovecraftian Rolly Polly Bugs. Only now do I realize that what we were witnessing was his “lives” flashing before his eyes. I wonder if it gets boring recounting the same life story again and again before your death. Seems tedious. Pattinson plays his death-laden recitation perfectly, like a dinner party story he’s been goaded into telling a thousand times. This first act flashback is so entertaining and odd, with Bong laying out the intricacies of this brave new world with the deftness of a master and the subtlety of a brick to the head, that you’d be forgiven for being surprised when the movie’s title card pops up about thirty minutes in. That whole story, of an entire life and sixteen, actually seventeen, deaths was just an appetizer for something far more intricate and so much weirder than you might imagine. Truly, we should expect nothing less from Bong, who made a whole film about a little girl’s journey to save her best friend, an experimental cow-thing the size of a Zamboni, from a futuristic slaughterhouse. The man somehow finds profundity in preversity, and nobody’s doing it like he does.
Bong is a deeply felt filmmaker, his work overflowing with compassion for the downtrodden, undying respect for the dignity of animals, and an unfettered revulsion of those who exploit either of the latter. As “Mickey 17” unfurls before us, with Pattinson providing a performance that is so transofrmative that you forget he’s playing all the Mickeys, we realize that while the copy and pasting of a human person is a neat sci-fi trick, it’s easy to forget that almost all progress trends towards exploitation on a long enough curb. Maybe mankind was never meant to leave this Earth of ours. It’s not like we’ve done such a good job taking care of things here. What “Mickey 17” posits, however, is ultimately an optimistic perspective that maybe some good can bloom from so much selfish destruction and death. I’d like to think that too, and while watching “Mickey 17”, I might just believe it’s even possible. Go figure.
You won’t find a bigger-budget film with this much to say and this much leeway to be this bananas anytime soon. In a world of corporate slop, embracing something new and exciting is the only way audiences receive the art they crave. “Mickey 17” is bold, silly cinema that holds a funhouse mirror to who we are and might be. Take a look for yourself.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Mickey 17” is playing at The Broad Theater and Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
