REVIEW: Bong Joon-ho clones familiar thematic fixations in ‘Mickey 17’
At one point in Mickey 17—director Bong Joon-ho’s madcap, full-throttle follow-up to his Oscar-acclaimed thriller Parasite—the titular character played by Robert Pattinson finds himself at the mercy of his boss, who berates and punishes him by halving his food ration and making him suffer in the cold for letting a soldier perish after an encounter with terrifying giant isopods aptly called “Creepers”—native life forms on early-2050s planet Niflheim—when, by design, it is his job to be expendable, to die many times over.
The most astonishing part about this scene is not the fact that we will later learn that even these freaky alien creatures refuse to devour this schlub of a hero, leading him to reckon himself as just “bad meat,” nor is it the knowledge that the character willingly surrenders to this treatment because of an existential crisis fueled by a childhood trauma. It’s that this scene’s sentiment reverberates throughout the rest of the movie: The insidiousness of capitalist labor is Bong’s source of unrelenting comedy and tragedy.
Before turning into Mickey 17, though, our protagonist lived first as Mickey Barnes, a hapless, timid orphan deceptively convinced by his soi-disant best friend Timo (Steven Yeun) to put up a macaron business using money from a loan shark they are now trying to outrun after the venture didn’t pan out.
Then an off-Earth opportunity presents itself: The two hastily sign up for a four-year expedition headed by the narcissistic politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), whose settler-colonist fantasies recall that of Elon Musk’s and whose ideals of racial purity perfectly evoke Trumpian ideologies, rendered more explicit by the red hats and t-shirts sported by his cult-like supporters. (At best, Ruffalo’s character, who often speaks gibberish at length, winds up a caricature, parallel to his sauce-obsessed wife played by Toni Collette; both performances feel tonally stagnant.)
In the spaceship, Timo tends the furnace, while Mickey functions as the “expendable,” which allows him to be copied to death through some sort of advanced MRI machine and a harddrive restoring his consciousness.
Mickey, by all means, is a human guinea pig; he’s a drudge incarnate. Rarely do we see an ounce of concern extended to him. When Mickey’s latest iteration is printed out, a crew member doesn’t bother if his body crashes onto the floor and instead keeps his focus on a video game he’s playing; or when Mickey falls through an ice cave, Timo makes no effort to rescue him and is more concerned with salvaging his prized equipment (he’ll be resurrected, anyway, his best pal argues).
It is the same inattention that leads to two Mickeys existing at the same time, a phenomenon that’s considered an abomination, as though being revived ad infinitum isn’t abomination enough, which means that both copies must be destroyed permanently, unless one sacrifices himself for the other. Mickey 18 is the total opposite of the iteration he succeeds; he’s a sexy alpha, brute force is his first impulse, and he cuts through the bullshit (think Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne), though a part of him still fears death. With Mickey 17’s soldier girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) in the mix, the situation also turns into an off-world, dopey Challengers fantasy.
Pattinson effectively internalizes and physicalizes the emotional throughlines of his two Mickeys, forging characterizations that don’t feel like mere duplicates, even as Bong swiftly snuffs out the conflict between his multiples to excuse a sneak into a handy, though sweeping, notion of inter-species coexistence, as the story nears its endnote. That thematic fixation is artificially tied to the movie’s critique of idle worship and colonialism; I say “artificially” because these broader ideas don’t feel as ripe here. Bong certainly takes more time heightening the conceit of Edward Ashton’s sci-fi novel Mickey7, from which the movie is adapted, but as he inflates the number of Mickeys in this retelling, the loose ends he needs to tie up also mount, and it doesn’t always yield neat results.
But here’s where the sauce is: Throughout the movie, questions about what it’s like to encounter death are incessantly hurled at Mickey. Yet even after biting the dust a dozen times, he’s still nowhere close to any real response. From this vantage point, and considering how Bong literalizes death for us, it is easy to make Mickey 17 seem like a picture about death in strict existential terms.
But I’d argue that this is a facile write-off. Mickey 17 is a deceptively romantic satire and a scathing diatribe on the ways capitalism dehumanizes workers; death in this case functions not just as a cog but as the very machine of capitalist labor. That Mickey is infinitely resurrected solely to clock in and carry out his task, whether to research the human body’s response to lethal levels of radiation or discover a vaccine for a virus, is grind culture at its best. The capitalist structure may not necessarily kill us, though it certainly can, but it compels us to live no life outside our labor, to mistake that the recognition of our dignity makes us disposable. And even in our dying, we must be efficient.
Bong’s previous titles share that same ethos. His monster movie The Host (2006) works as an environmental autopsy of the kind of horror created when for-profit industries pay no heed to marginalized populations. Snowpiercer (2013) teases out how capitalism sustains class inequalities and worker exploitation through a familiar humanity-on-the-brink-of-extinction narrative framework. Okja (2017), which sees its young protagonist colliding with the captors of her pet superpig, doubles as an indictment of corporate rapacity. Then there’s the Oscar-winning Parasite (2019), a gorgeously photographed and scored family drama propelled by its characters’ economic disparities.
Save perhaps for Okja, these past movies are chiefly spatial. Whether real-life or custom-built, the locations—the sewers, a train, a semi-basement flat, and a wealthy family residence—serve as characters themselves and reify Bong’s consistent rebuke of the capitalist structure. In Mickey 17, it is the spaceship with its retrofuturistic “gritty, cargo-ship” features that performs that role.
So, does Bong run the risk of repeating himself? Not exactly. Though aspects of his previous work inevitably crop up in this latest project (for one, it confirms Bong’s knack for taking things to fascinating extremes), Mickey 17 is far more hopeful than the rest of the director’s corpus. There is life, it turns out, beyond our labor.
Mickey 17 opens in Philippine cinemas on March 5. Watch the trailer below.
