Parasite won the Palm d’Or in 2019. It was the first Korean film to win that award. Then, in 2020, it won the Oscar for Best Picture. It was similarly the first non-English language film to win that award. Only four films in the history of cinema had ever won both the Palm d’Or as well as the Oscar for Best Picture. The film’s director, Bong Joon-ho, was given the blank check to end all blank checks. The sky was the limit; having achieved the impossible, he could make any film that he wanted. So what did he do? He made a silly Hollywood science fiction movie where Robert Pattinson is killed seventeen times.
Mickey 17 (loosely adapted from Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7) is the story of Mickey, a man of the future who signs up for space colonization in order to escape his debt. His spacecraft registers him as an “expendable” and backs up his genetic data and memories. Then they print a new Mickey every time he dies; whether by cosmic radiation, accident or virus. One day, after falling into a den of aliens on the planet Niflheim, Mickey’s seventeenth iteration unexpectedly survives. But when he returns to base, he discovers that they have already printed Mickey 18. That makes the two of them multiple, and per human law, multiples must be killed on sight.
Courtesy of Warner Bros.If Parasite was a carefully constructed deathtrap of a movie, Mickey 17 is a goof. The characters are broader. The plot rambles instead of winding tightly. It’s a two-hour extravaganza of bawdy jokes and high-concept science fiction narrated by Robert Pattinson in full voice actor mode. If you enjoyed his take on Miyazaki’s Heron in that film’s English dub, wait until you meet Mickey 17—a hapless rat in human form who’s just a little guy, man!
So it’s not a film in danger of winning any Academy Awards. But I don’t think that’s what Bong is trying to do here. His Hollywood films, like Snowpiercer and Okja, have always been bigger and baggier than his Korean work. Mickey 17 shares that generosity of spirit. It’s not trying to be precise. It wants to be an American film, a cartoon. Perhaps even a comic book.
It’s no secret that Bong is a manga fan. He’s the guy who recommended that fellow director Park Chan-wook read Oldboy before Park was even pitched on the film project. He’s also blurbed both Naoki Urasawa (Asadora!) and Taiyo Matsumoto (Tokyo These Days.) Mickey 17 at its best has the feel of a manga series, like if you mixed Nobuyuki Fukamoto’s blue collar thriller Gambling Apocalypse: KAIJI together with the zaniness of Reiichi Sugimoto and Shinkichi Kato’s Kokumin Quiz.
Courtesy of Warner Bros.Mickey 17’s actors throw themselves into being comic book caricatures. Nobody does it better than Robert Pattinson, who nails not just the preternaturally helpless Mickey 17 but his louder, meaner multiple Mickey 18. These two personas aren’t necessarily complex but they are convincing as two parts of a whole. As if you split Fukamoto’s hero Kaiji right down the middle and made his survival instinct and hatred of authority two different people united by their fear of death.
The others are all over the map. Mark Ruffalo, as the leader of the space expedition, leans so far into Donald Trump’s speech affectations that it can be distracting. Toni Collette plays his wife as the world’s most evil white woman. Their personalities are so big that they can’t help but wash out actors in smaller roles like Anamaria Vartolomei. Right in the middle is Naomi Ackie, who finds the humanizing thread between two or three absurd cliches that Bong is asking her to play at once.
These actors spit out block letter dialogue, as if it was inscribed in a comic rather than something a real person might say. I suspect that, too, is deliberate. This is a film of big arresting images: endless fields of ice, smoke exploding from machinery, Pattinson’s half-printed body flopping on the ground. Everything in the film is pitched to meet that level. Over time I came to think of the dialogue more as a suggestion of what the audience is meant to feel at any moment than literal reality.
Courtesy of Warner Bros.Hollywood has largely given up on spectacle. Save for folks like Denis Villenuve, George Miller and occasionally Christopher Nolan, most big blockbusters blandly remix set pieces and motifs that were done better thirty or forty years ago. Bong Joon Ho on the other hand delivers a full meal with Mickey 17. The film’s alien designs in particular carry forward lessons learned from earlier films like The Host and Okja while achieving a charm all their own. They’re both cute and believably terrifying when the situation calls for it. The ending of the film, where the aliens go all out to protect their home, plays like a scene from a Junji Ito comic in the best way possible.
Mickey 17 also retains the social commentary that made Parasite such a gut-wrenching watch. It’s not just another film about how society’s undesirables are tortured by cruel wealthy people. Bong somehow (whether by chance or through the power of reshoots) predicted Donald Trump’s attempted assassination in 2024. Of course, South Korea has its own nasty political history; I wouldn’t be surprised if the film’s emphasis on religion’s ties to fascism is riffing on the Unification Church or the Evangelical Baptist Church. But it’s really something to see Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette insist that they will build a “pure, white” home on planet Niflheim, only to be deposed by a black woman with a future in politics.
Courtesy of Warner Bros.Where Mickey 17 diverges from Parasite is that it has a happy ending. Evil is defeated and humanity chooses to embrace a more just and equitable future rather than succumb to its fears. It’s funny that this happens in a film about a crappy little guy like Mickey when Bong could have given the cast of Parasite a break. Again, though, I think that’s the point. Mickey might be a sad sack but he isn’t evil. He deserves happiness and a bowl of chicken shawarma as much as any Marvel hero.
Mickey 17 then is the kind of movie that could only greenlit after Parasite. Nobody makes mid-budget high concept science fiction movies anymore. Bong Joon-ho saw an opportunity to make such a film with great alien effects for a wide audience and he took it. The window of opportunity was already closing; since then, David Zazlav has hacked and slashed through Warner Bros., while Trump’s United States is now cracking down on “progressive” art. I don’t know how many movies we’ll see quite like this: populist genre films that aren’t based on a big property and freely mix political commentary with sex jokes. It’s not my favorite Bong Joon-ho film, but I’m glad it exists.
Mickey 17 is available to watch in theaters right now.
English (US) · 