Directed by Bong Joon Ho | Written by Bong Joon Ho and Edward Ashton | 137 min | ▲▲▲
It’s a challenge to write a review for this film. It bangs up against the wild expectations following with the world-conquering Parasite, the Oscar-winning triumph by Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho. From any other filmmaker, Mickey 17 would be simply what it is: a charming, science-fiction satire exploring class, capitalism, politics, the value of human life and our relationship with animals — in many ways mirroring the concerns of its predecessor. Compared, however, to Parasite and Director Bong’s body of work, including his English-language sci-fi offerings like Okja and Snowpiercer, it can’t help but be a bit of a disappointment.
Robert Pattinson, channeling Steve Buscemi’s physicality and his voice, is Mickey Barnes. He’s joined an expedition to another planet. Humans have destroyed our own so we need to go elsewhere to live and propagate the species. It’s tough to get on this ship due to demand, and since Mickey doesn’t have any skills and he and his buddy, Timo (Steven Yeun), are on the run from loan sharks, he signs up as an Expendable. Technology has provided the means for Mickey’s body and consciousness to be backed up and printed out should he expire, which the mission requires (in many bloody and violent ways) in order to develop deadly nerve gases and test the safety of the new planet the humans arrive on. When Mickey realizes how painful and humiliating it is to die on the regular — 16 times en route to their new icy home — and how little respect he gets for his sacrifices, Mickey admits he should’ve read the fine print.
Mickey finds a sweetheart on board the ship, the lovely Nasha (Naomi Ackie, Blink Twice), which improves the four-year journey to the planet immensely, but their arrival is complicated by Mickey 17 surviving an encounter with the indigenous aliens on the planet without the humans knowing, so they print out Mickey 18. Multiples are a real no-no in this future world, especially in the eyes of mission leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo as a Trump-like religious demagogue with an impressive set of fake choppers) and his sauce-obsessed wife, Yifa (Toni Collette).
In all of that, we get a few fantastic moments — the blades of the satire cut into the absurdity of the cult of personality and casual cruelty of corporate hierarchies. This is a movie that makes you smile, but it’s without the laugh-out-loud power of, say, The Death Of Stalin, which just gets better and better in hindsight. Nor does it slice as deeply as Starship Troopers or Brazil, two films to which it owes a serious debt.
Its profligate use of ideas, while stimulating, means a few them don’t get enough screentime. When two Mickeys are walking around, his relationship with Nasha gets complicated, especially since Mickey 18 has a distinctly different personality than Mickey 17, a detail that’s never really explained. Nasha’s also unexplained passion for Mickey, or the joys and problems of having two of him around, could’ve been a whole subplot here, but it’s abandoned as swiftly as it’s introduced. (And why aren’t more Expendables on the ship? Is Sylvester Stallone so busy these days?) Mickey and Timo’s relationship and history isn’t properly explored either, and while Ruffalo and Collette go big and go fun, we might spend a little too much time with them.
All this to say, Bong Joon Ho’s clever, sometimes surprising, and frequently amusing film suffers from an issue of buy-in. It’s missing real heart. We never really care for Mickey, his friends or enemies, with the plot around them so busily pushing them in one direction or another. It means Mickey 17 is still very much worth seeing, but is likely to be considered a minor work from Director Bong.
