Mickey 17 (2025) - dir. Bong Joon Ho
After winning the Best Picture Oscar for Parasite, Bong’s next project was eagerly awaited. When it was announced it was Mickey 17 (based on a book, Mickey7, by Edward Ashton)a lot of folks, myself included, were really interested to see what he would do. This wouldn’t be his first sci-fi outing.
The basic setup: Mickey (Robert Pattinson, who has become a reliable indicator of an interesting project) is in deep debt to a very dangerous loan shark, thanks to being screwed over by his awful, manipulative ‘friend’, played by Steven Yeun. To save his own hide, he signs up to be an ‘expendable’ on a colony ship headed to the wintery planet of Niflheim (which is the frozen land of the dead in Norse mythology!), being led by Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a sleazy, ignorant, deliberately cruel, failed politician who dreams of a “pure, white world full of genetically superior people”. What this means is, Mickey’s memories are backed up into some tech device, and then he’s sent on a dangerous mission, or exposed to mysterious radiation or an alien virus. If/when he dies, a new body is printed, his memories are restored, and then he’s off to the next mission. Once they reach the planet, they also have to deal with “creepers”, a lifeform that looks like a cross between a tardigrade and a pillbug, with a bit of wooly mamoth thrown in.
There is a LOT going on here. The question of printing people is a reshuffled version of the Trek transporter problem, namely: What the transporter actually does is disintegrate you, and then builds you anew based on the data of the old. You are dying, and something is reassembled that believes it is you. Is it? That’s the big moral issue here, and it’s a really interesting question. And there’s the question of the creepers, and what the humans ASSUME they are. Unfortunately, Bong gives both of these debates pretty cursory treatment, since he devotes way more time to the conflict with Ruffalo’s idiotic leader, who might as well have painted himself orange an worn a too-long red power tie and an ill-fitting suit. Political themes are hardly a surprise from Bong. The Host was a kaiju movie about environmental pollution, and the class division struggle in Snowpiercer and Parasite are front and center. Unfortunately, setting up such a moronic target as Ruffalo’s character just feels… easy. And the fact that the film ends with a hopeful note, as sanity and practicality triumph, it feels like a forced happy ending, especially given that in actuality, well… gestures vaguely around at… everything.
It’s a shame, because Pattinson gives a great performance and about 2/3rds of the movie is quite engaging. But the big, broad strokes being used to paint the political themes are just too simplistic, too naive to register properly. It’s as if someone decided to insert freshman poli-sci paper into Silent Running (a classic 1972 environmentally concious sci-fi film starring Bruce Dern. Highly recomended.) Every time there’s an interesting idea, it’s twisted into the political narrative. It becomes tiresome. The film contains a good 90 minutes of really interesting, if somewhat standard, sci-fi material. Unfortunately, it’s two and a quarter hours long.
2.5/5
