VERDICT: Multiple Robert Pattinson share a risky deep-space mission in ‘Parasite’ director Bong Joon-ho’s visually dazzling but muddled sci-fi comedy thriller.
Six years after his historic, multiple Oscar-wining triumphs with Parasite (2019), Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho is finally back on the big screen with his latest sci-fi comedy thriller Mickey 17. Backed by Warners, Bong’s first film for a major Hollywood studio arrives on a wave of nervous anticipation, especially after its release was pushed back a year, reportedly due to industry strikes.
Mickey 17 boasts dazzling visuals, blockbuster dimensions, and a stellar international cast headlined by Robert Pattinson, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Ackie, and Steven Yeun. Typically for Bong, it fizzes with energy and touches on deeper sociopolitical themes. But it also suffers from many of the same blind spots as the director’s previous English-language work, weighed down by too much-strained slapstick humor, lost-in-translation dialogue, exaggerated caricatures, and superfluous subplots.
It feels loud, starr, and critic-proof enough to attract big audiences, but devotees of Parasite will be disappointed. If that film was Bong for adults, this is Bong for adolescent fanboys. Following its Berlin Film Festival premiere, it opens in Korea on February 28, followed by an international roll-out through March and April.
Based on Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey 7, this is Bong’s first non-original adaptation since Snowpiercer (2013), a troubled production with which it shares some stylistic and thematic parallels. Both are satirical dystopian thrillers about tightly enclosed future societies run on strictly hierarchical class lines by authoritarian leaders, with the lower orders portrayed as disposable grunts and the rulers as decadent sociopaths.
Pattinson plays Mickey Barnes, a hapless shlub on the run from an all-powerful, notoriously sadistic gangster. Figuring his only survival option is to leave Earth altogether, he signs up to work as an “expendable” on a deep-space colonizing mission to the far-away planet Niflheim. The work entails Mickey becoming a human lab rat on the ship, consenting to be repeatedly killed in a series of medical experiments and high-risk tasks, only to be revived again through a special “printer” that reconstructs his body, mind, and digitally stored memories from scratch. This is an inspired premise, and these opening scenes are the strongest in the film, playing on the same kind of existential concerns as left-field classics like Groundhog Day (1993), Moon (2009,) or Edge of Tomorrow (2014).
Mickey finds love on the spaceship in the form of Nasha (Ackie), a super-hot Intergalactic Pixie Dream Girl. But he also falls foul of the colonizing mission’s vainglorious leader Marshall (Ruffalo), a failed politician with a fascistic messiah complex, and his wife Ylfa (Collette) an unhinged Lady Macbeth obsessed with culinary sauce ingredients. While Collette’s shrill performance recalls Tilda Swinton’s gargoyle diva in Snowpiercer, this grotesque power couple is modeled on Donald and Melania Trump.
Alas, Mickey 17 was filmed long before the felon-in-chief scored his shock second election victory, and these scathing jabs feel more bitterly ironic than prophetic. Both performances are also pitched at maximum dastardly clown level, and thus never feel remotely menacing, more like over-the-top stage villains designed to draw Pavlovian boos and hisses.
Once the colonizing mission arrives on snowy Niflheim, Bong slackens the suspense lever a little too far. Mickey has a close encounter with the planet’s indigenous inhabitants, slithering gastropods clothed in armadillo-like skins, who look ferocious but prove to be surprisingly benign. Left for dead in an icy ravine, he returns to the ship to find he has already been reprinted as Mickey 18 (Pattinson again), a more ruthless doppelganger who instantly becomes his mortal enemy due to some pointlessly contrived backstory about “multiples” being strictly illegal. Meanwhile, Nasha shrugs off the danger and proposes a kinky threesome with both Mickeys. Almost as if she were the fantasy creation of a male screenwriter.
Mickey 17 is rich in classy ingredients: a starry ensemble cast doing their best with cartoonish roles, world-class production design, luscious cinematography, and high-end visual effects, particularly the superbly finessed scenes featuring double helpings of Pattinson. But its final act is fatally low on tension or narrative logic, lost in a knotty tangle of random subplots and wildly implausible twists.
Marshall hatches a genocidal scheme to exterminate the harmless extra-terrestrials, for reasons Bong never really makes clear, aside from Ylfa viewing them as potential sauce ingredients. Meanwhile, former friends become enemies and vice versa, key characters stumble into dumb traps, crucial messages are relayed using coded terms for sexual positions, and audience patience is tested to the limit. Bong is a modern cinematic master, but this maximalist muddle gives full vent to both his strengths and his flaws.
