After six years and multiple delays, Oscar winning director and Korean film trailblazer Bong Joon-ho is finally back to big screens globally with his Mickey 17, a dystopian sci-fi adaptation of Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel, Mickey 7. Bong changed the title because he wanted to see his protagonist die ten more times.
The film is led by Robert Pattinson as Mickey Barnes, a naïve, down-on-his-luck orphan who, in an effort to escape a loan shark and a decrepit Earth, signs up to board a spaceship colony headed towards a new planet, Niflheim. Not entirely aware of what he was signing up for, he chooses “Expendable” as his job, making him the science team’s lab rat for all things deadly. You see, they had developed a human printing machine which, upon uploading Mickey’s genetic makeup and memories, could create as many specimens as their hearts desired.
The protagonist’s job is, then, essentially, to die for the cause, over and over and over — whether that’s in service of spacecraft maintenance, vaccine development, or planet reconnaissance.
Leading the charge is Mark Ruffalo in a Trump-infused performance as the colony’s populist leader, Commander Kenneth Marshall, a failed Earthly politician who turns to the space race to fulfill his megalomaniac ambitions, instead — the latter part more akin to the real life U.S. president’s right-hand man or, as some would argue, puppeteer, billionaire businessman and famed SpaceX founder, Elon Musk.
More interestingly, Marshall is less a charismatic leader than a well-oiled mouthpiece for his wife’s even more eccentric illusions of grandeur. Toni Collette is fabulous as the devious, ethnically ambiguous Ylfa, sharing an oddly captivating chemistry with Ruffalo as the ship’s sociopathic leaders.
Meanwhile, Mickey also finds love. Granted, one that’s much less unhinged than Marshall and Ylfa’s. He meets security agent Nasha (Naomi Ackie) early on, and though you wonder at first what she sees in him, you quickly bite into their tender, and slightly freaky, romance as the emotional core of the film. Nasha stands by Mickey’s every version, comforting him as Cameron Britton’s twisted science team boss, Arkady, puts him through the wringer. Later, there’s a particularly striking scene where she holds his body as he rots away from a deadly airborne Niflheim virus. It becomes clear that Bong has found the key to survival and the answer to offsetting the soul-rotting vices of modern society: love.
Though many of his characters are, there’s nothing cynical or nihilistic about Bong’s work. Quite the opposite, actually. The director seems invested in preserving hope and love amidst our ever-putrescent reality. And Mickey 17 is perhaps his most romantic film.
The exposition-heavy first half hour of the film and, especially, the sequence showing Mickey’s multiple deaths oscillates between humorously cruel and cruelly humorous, while you’re left oscillating between nausea and amusement. That carefully crafted balance between the barbarism of common, repeated violence and the hilarity of its outrageousness create the film’s very distinctive brand of comedy, one which has Bong Joon-ho written all over it.
For the audiences who only know the South Korean director from his exquisite, genre bending thriller Parasite, Mickey 17‘s sci-fi eccentricity will feel like a bizarre leap. However, it’s actually the third film in an unofficial trilogy that makes up an entire subsection of Bong’s filmography, and, more specifically, his ventures into the English language.
It’s curious to note how Bong tends to go darker and more serious in his Korean films, albeit maintaining the satirical bite that has come to define his filmmaking. But in 2013’s Snowpiercer, 2017’s Okja, and now Mickey 17 — all three dystopian sci-fi-esque critiques of capitalism and materialism — he’s so much more whimsical. It’s like the distance that the English language provides allows him to be completely unabashed and unafraid of the maximalism that he also surely must recognize in American society — itself so wildly distant from Korean’s much humbler, but also much more repressed, culture.
In fact, neither of these three films is very interested in subtlety — at least not in the way Parasite or Memories of Murder are. When making American films, for all intents and purposes, Bong is loud and on-the-nose with his metaphors. In Snowpiercer, the social hierarchy is laid out linearly into a train’s different classes; in Okja, a little girl tries to save her pet pig from slaughter and mad scientists; and in Mickey 17, a human being’s life is literally made “expendable” in service of his job.
Similarly, Ruffalo’s autocrat may feel heavy-handed. His devout followers also wear embroidered hats, albeit blue, with his slogan. His speech and mannerisms are exaggerated, his tan foundation noticeable, and, together with Ylfa, they flaunt their riches (primarily abundant food) while attempting to convince their calorie-controlled subjects that their deprivation is a brave, patriotic sacrifice for the colony’s greater good. There’s little about this story that’s left to claw its way out of the realm of subtext, and maybe that’s for the best, given the current media illiteracy epidemic.
There’s one exception, though. Bong intentionally leaves the film’s meditations on death to be read between the lines, possibly as a way to allow the viewer to imprint their own personal feelings on life’s most enigmatic aspect. Mickey often complains about how many times people ask him what it feels like to die. He never really provides an answer — but when given the space to, he does occasionally reflect on how it terrifies him every time, and how much he dislikes it. And it’s like no one really listens (and you wonder “Why ask, then?”) — except for Nasha, of course.
The most poignant aspect of Mickey 17, which certainly sets it apart from other mega productions of its kind, is, again, its audacious sincerity. Mickey, Nasha, and other stand-out minor characters, like Anamaria Vartolomei’s Kai or Patsy Ferran’s Dorothy, love loudly and are steadfast in their principles, or, in the latter’s case, they learn to become that way. It’s a genuinely sweet movie despite all the gruesome deaths, creepy crawling insects (which, by the way, teach the humans a thing or two about community), bleak grayish photography, and literal icy setting.
The crux of the film’s pathos, of course, lies in the character of Mickey, who’s trusting and empathetic to a fault. Because of these traits, he becomes the film’s hero, ultimately saving the day in more ways than one (all of which we’ll leave unspoiled to somewhat preserve the experience of first time viewers). Pattinson is dizzying in the role, tapping into so many facets of human existence through the most unassuming of mono/dialogues, but especially through his boundlessly expressive stares and little facial twists. Bong recognized his genius from films like the Safdies’ Good Time and Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse, and gifted him with a role that enabled him to showcase the true breadth of his range. And what a match made in weird, earnest heaven that was.
Those who enjoyed the Bong of Okja and Snowpiercer will definitely get a kick out of Mickey 17, but don’t expect the elegant nuance of Parasite. Ultimately, this director sticks to his guns and, whatever he makes, he makes it wholeheartedly. And that’s always a triumph.
Published: Mar 7, 2025 12:54 pm