In 'Mickey 17,' Bong Joon Ho recycles Robert Pattinson and his old ideas
Of course, Bong Joon Ho is an environmentalist. He recycles his own ideas.
'Mickey 17,' a sloppy but enjoyable sci-fi comedy set in the year 2054, mashes together the monsterphobia of 'The Host,' the animal-rights activism of 'Okja,' the environmental doomsaying of 'Snowpiercer,' and the social inequality of 'Parasite,' that last one the Oscar winner that handed Bong the blank check to make a combo platter of his greatest hits. It's the equivalent of the lunch tray that Mickey 17 (Robert Pattinson) gobbles up in his outer-space cafeteria: squares of the same nutritious gunk. But I'm not complaining. Some filmmakers deliver sermons; Bong serves entertainment.
The 17th Mickey is a flesh photocopy of Mickey Barnes, a good-for-nothing dope desperate to flee Earth after his macaron business flops and its main investor threatens him with a chain saw. Earth isn't worth sticking around for, anyway. 'Seems like the whole of this planet was running away from something,' Mickey says, gazing up at a long line of wannabe migrants jostling to earn a spot on an escape ship headed to the ice planet Niflheim. As frigid as it is, Niflheim doesn't seem any worse than the pounding dust storms at home.
The trouble is, Mickey doesn't have any skills. He's underqualified to fly planes or lead science experiments or even dish the gunk. Mickey is a moron. A sweet moron, but a moron nonetheless, which is evident as soon as Pattinson starts squeaking banalities in a nasal gasp that sounds as though he's never gotten enough oxygen to his brain. In Edward Ashton's original 2022 novel 'Mickey 7,' the character is an academic, a punchline that's even more bleak.
So Mickey signs up to be the ship's 'expendable,' a canary-meets-crash-test-dummy who continually sacrifices his life in service of the fledgling colony. Someone has to sample the radiation in the atmosphere and the toxins in the air. Someone has to die to develop vaccines. He's a human-on-demand 3D-reprint, made from scraps of garbage. Fittingly, Pattinson hunches his shoulders and curls his upper lip: an obedient lab rat.
The premise isn't 'Groundhog Day.' Mickey 17 remembers the pain of all prior Mickeys, from the original through 16. Among the indignities a newly vulnerable Mickey suffers, each one spurts out of a stuttering printer and flops to the floor, forsaken. With every copy, he's treated less like a person. One of the smart tweaks Bong has made to Ashton's book is devolving the character from an everyman into a passive stooge. He's hurting all over but can't think straight about what is to blame.
In the opening scene, Mickey is trapped at the bottom of a chasm having plummeted not to his doom, but to everyone else's inconvenience. Cold and scared, he stares up at his supposed best friend Timo (Steven Yeun), hoping for rescue. Timo sizes up his injuries with the impassivity of an insurance adjuster and abandons him to freeze.
'Have a nice death,' Timo says offhandedly. Mickey shivers. 'Yeah, no … we're cool.'
The highfalutin parallel is to 'Candide,' the classic 18th century novel about a naif who endures the horrors of civilization: chaos, selfishness, disease and destruction. The problems of 1759 are the same ones of 2054, with too many years in between. Bong's probably read Voltaire. But his film plays to a poppier crowd. Mickey's bowl hair cut is straight out of 'Dumb and Dumber.' His obtuse optimism makes him the intergalactic Forrest Gump.
Inconceivably, women love him. Mickey has an out-of-his-league girlfriend, Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who, when 17 takes too long to get back to her bedroom, proves a bit too eager for a replacement. The 18th Mickey, also played by Pattinson, is a more standard-issue hero who magically has a brain behind his eyes. Pattinson has incredible physical control over both 17's slack-jawed, knock-kneed cartoon and his identical opposite. (Nasha calls them 'mild and habanero.') As Pattinson toggles between the two, you can't help but think back to how the former 'Twilight' heartthrob shape-shifted himself out of playing romantic leads. You can practically imagine Pattinson experimenting with his own face in front of a mirror, figuring out which tilt of the jaw transforms him from handsome (blah) to Neanderthal (hooray).
Most people on the ship are varying degrees of toadies to the ship's overlords, a vainglorious politician named Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his savvier wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), who course-corrects her husband when he blurts the wrong thing. Mandatory celibacy does not go over well, a joke that springs from the novel's note that the colonists had no intellectually stimulating hobbies. ('Mostly, we banged,' Ashton writes.) The sex shtick is paired with a boisterous piano score that feels like it thundered in from a western — it doesn't work at all. But I did like spotting the details in the futuristic costume design that puts buttons and pockets in bizarre places.
Marshall is a pseudo-religious hypocrite who rails against his enemies, both foreign — Niflheim's native inhabitants, an armadillo-esque species dubbed the 'creepers' — and domestic, multiples like Mickey whom he calls 'Satan's work.' Bong has given the leader TV aspirations; the makeup team has given him orange tanner. You know the drill even before you see his fans in the colony wearing red ball caps and saluting with one arm. Here is where I should note that the film wrapped shooting in 2022. Bong must have gambled that the gag would be kitschy, if still overdone. Voltaire would have warned that history repeats and repeats and repeats.
Ruffalo has always struck me as a genuinely decent man. Lately, he's been investing that goodwill in playing fiends, like his Oscar-nominated turn as the lech in 'Poor Things.' He slides into these carapaces as though they're a rubber Godzilla suit and goes on the rampage. As for Ylfa, a newly concocted character, she exists just to squeeze a talent of Collette's caliber and comedic chops into the plot. Her Ylfa is a glamorous foodie — herself a photocopy of Tilda Swinton's meat-loving tycoon in 'Okja.' Rhapsodizing about condiments to a ship of starving workers, Ylfa may as well bleat, 'Let them eat ketchup!'
The last stretch of the movie drags on as it shifts away from Mickey's storyline, Bong changing gears to his favorite topic: uprisings. The sense that Bong has made this movie before leads him to take lazy shortcuts. One subplot involves a second 'Okja' spin-off, a roly-poly baby-mammal thing who we're meant to find adorable simply because it's there. Sure, it's small, whatever. The creature design is similar to a microscopic tardigrade, which gives it enough biological credibility to balance out that it also has the same unfolding tentacle mouths as every other alien of the last 15 years.
More interesting is that the beasts appear to be bonded en masse — their society shares an empathy that humankind lacks. Not one creeper seems to doubt that the others have a soul. We cannot say the same with a straight face, without or without tentacle mouths. As semi-inessential as 'Mickey 17' feels in Bong's canon, I'm at peace that he keeps asking how to give everyone's life value. He'll keep repeating the question until we come up with an answer.
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