Mickey 17

If you’ve ever experienced a Bong Joon Ho movie, you know you’re in for something weird. There is generally some social commentary about class mixed with sci-fi or unreality and and/or a whole lot of creepiness. Sometimes that creepiness is explicit like it is in Parasite, and sometimes the creepiness is just inherent in the subject matter and/or visuals, like in Okja. This is all to say that going into one of his films, you know you’re going to be in for some real strangeness, and a whole lot of creativity. Even if that creativity doesn’t always land the way you’d hope it would.

First, Mickey 17 is based on a novel. So the story itself is not all on Bong. Though I imagine he took liberties with the narrative. But it certainly fits in with the rest of his filmography — at least the stuff I’ve seen — thematically. I gotta say, it piqued my interest, what with its zany visual style, fun sci-fi storyline and that blacker-than-black comedy that often accompanies his films. Though this film looked to feature the comedy in a little more explicit way based on solely on the weird, whiny American-accented voice that Robert Pattinson was rocking in the trailer, and the almost slapstick nature of the action. Because, as it turns out, the movie basically finds myriad crazy ways to kill Pattinson’s Mickey character over and over again. Funny, right?

I don’t know much about Korean culture. At least anything beyond what I’ve learned from Hipster Jr. Jr. and her steady diet of Korean television and music. But it seems there is a large issue there with debt. A theme that obviously drives Squid Game. And is the impetus for Mickey’s situation in this film. He and his partner, Timo (Steven Yeun), have some hair-brained business ideas that fail and they end up in deep with some dangerous loan sharks who are looking for payback. So they sign up to go off-planet to escape their debtors, Timo becoming a pilot and Mickey an “expendable.” An expendable being the one (and only one) person on this mission who takes on the critical, but almost always fatal jobs that require a human to perform. The nice part being — if you could call it that — every time Mickey dies, they reprint out a new clone of him, complete with the entirety of his consciousness. I’ll let you guess how many Mickeys we’ve gone through in a film called Mickey 17. You get the gimmick. Which, when watched in the trailer, feels clever and fun. Kind of an Edge of Tomorrow, but different. Because Bong Joon Ho is clearly making a political statement about the poor and/or indebted being not worth the skin they live in. Disposable. Human crash dummies. Lab rats. You get it.

And so we get to watch Mickey die over and over again on this ice planet. Where you just know some weird creatures are going to live because, once again, this is the man who made Okja. A really weird fucking movie about giant things that he calls pigs that are most definitely not pigs. The thing is Bong gets too many things going. This aforementioned social commentary. A narrative about the nature of cloning. Obviously. A pro-indigenous, anti-colonial argument revolving around these creatures that they so creatively call “Creepers.” Plus a Trump / Evangelical Jim and Tammy Faye weirdo thing going on in Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette’s Kenneth and Yifa Marshall characters. The leaders of this expedition of cult-like acolytes trying to colonize this planet for financial glory. Or something. And this is where things kind of go haywire. Those two bad-guy characters feel like someone trying to write a very specific American type, but not hitting any of the right notes. Sure, they’re cartoonish and annoying and Ruffalo’s teeth alone made me want to turn the thing off at times, but there’s just something off about the portrayals. These are two good actors, so I don’t think I can put it on them. So I’ll have to blame the writer / director for the pretty atrocious mess that’s made of their motivations and inconsistency. It’s not fun. It’s not funny.

Meanwhile, things seem to kind of spin their wheels. I couldn’t tell if I was bored, or the pacing was off or what. But we paused the film toward what we felt had to be the third act and realized we were only 40 minutes into a two-hour-and-seventeen-minute movie. It was deflating. And disappointing. We powered through and the action picked up, we got used to Pattinson’s delivery — especially when we get to meet Mickey 18, who is much less of a passive oddball — and it turns out the movie is better as a whole than taken in parts. I can’t claim I didn’t ask “What the hell is going on?” at least 20 times during the span of the film, but that’s just me being confused by Boon’s logic leaps and the aforementioned sloppiness in the pacing and plotting. I’m not certain how the book progressed and if perhaps there was more internal dialogue (which was done through voiceover in the film) that made things make more sense. As it stands, though, Mickey 17 really rides the line between being just entertaining and thought-provoking enough to be worth watching if you’re willing to put up with the truly baffling nonsense that comes with it.