Bong Joon-ho was delighted by a congratulatory letter he received from Martin Scorsese after his 2019 Korean-language film Parasite triumphed at the Oscars. At a press conference, Bong revealed that Scorsese had said he and other directors were keenly awaiting his next movie. “You’ve done well. Now rest. But don’t rest for too long.”
Here at last, six years later, is Bong’s next film, financed on a different scale. Parasite was made on a budget of $11.4m and took $258m at the box office worldwide. Mickey 17 is ten times the punt, with a $118m budget, lavished by Warner Bros.
It is based on the amiable sci-fi novel Mickey7, by Edward Ashton, optioned by Warners even before it was published. Mickey7, tonally reminiscent of The Martian by Andy Weir, is set in the future and narrated by Mickey Barnes, an “expendable”. Mickey, a natural loser, has joined a mission to colonise a distant planet, led by a messianic twice-failed politician, by agreeing to be its one member who can be endlessly “reprinted”, his body replicated and his mind downloaded. Mickey performs tasks that will kill him, undertaking medical experiments or braving deadly radiation, safe in the knowledge that 48 hours later, he’ll be back, ready to go again.
One day, though, on the freezing new planet Niflheim, it all goes wrong. Having fallen down a hole in the ice, Mickey7 is left for dead and his successor Mickey8 duly printed up. But Mickey7 is surprisingly rescued by the planet’s native creatures, known as Creepers. So now there are two of him and that’s a problem, not only with his girlfriend, Nasha, but with the authorities: “multiples” are strictly forbidden.
This story’s affinities with Bong’s cinematic imagination are obvious. Oppressed individuals in autocratic, enclosed environments, as in Snowpiercer and Parasite. Weird but not evil creatures, as in The Host and Okja. Claustrophobic dark places, abysses, passim.
Bong has vigorously dramatised his source, as the change in title alone suggests, allowing for many more gruesome deaths to be shown. Most of the techy inventions – which Ashton, a cancer researcher and quantum physics lecturer as well as novelist, evidently enjoys – have been quietly forgotten.
Mickey 17 starts promisingly, with the scene in which our downtrodden hero (Robert Pattinson) falls into a tremendous crevasse and is heartlessly left to die by his supposed friend, Timo (Steven Yeun). As Mickey returns to the vast, grubby spacecraft that is home, we get his backstory, until we return again to this turning point, and the confounding discovery that there are now two of him (another idea that has appealed to Bong before, there having been twin Tilda Swintons in Okja).
Pattinson is endearing as passive, dopey Mickey 17, before transforming into aggressive, macho Mickey 18, modelled on Robert De Niro’s nastiest roles, with only snarly teeth to show as a physical difference. As Nasha, the British actress Naomi Ackie is convincingly excited by the prospect of getting both of them in bed together. The far future is surprisingly English, perhaps because Mickey 17 was made at the Warner studio in Leavesden.
Where the movie goes wrong is its satirising of the vile leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his grotesque, manipulative wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette). It’s more than heavy handed: Marshall announces that he is creating “a pure white planet full of superior people”, while Nasha speaks up for “the native inhabitants of our planet”, the Creepers (caterpillars-cum-walruses, given to bounding around like spring lambs).
Ruffalo, a surprisingly funny villain in Poor Things, is terrible here. He clumsily parodies Donald Trump with his gestures, expressions, wearing big teeth. But, as the last few weeks have illustrated, Trump is not a joke. (Alec Baldwin’s gurning impressions on SNL have never been funny; the recent film The Apprentice works better as it goes back to Trump before Trump.) Bong is celebrated for his abrupt shifts in tone, finding comedy in horror, but this turn defeats him and undoes the whole movie.
Mickey 17 was filmed in 2022, perhaps assuming that Trump would lose two elections in a row, but for various reasons, including the 2023 Hollywood strike, its release has been delayed, often announced and then postponed again, until now. It’s bad timing. But revisiting Bong’s 2003 breakout masterpiece, Memories of Murder, about the chaotic investigation of a real-life serial killer at that time unidentified, re-released in 2020 in the wake of Parasite, reveals how dislocated, inflated and coarsened his film-making has become since his international success.
“Mickey 17” is in cinemas now
[See also: Art and the ruins of the left]
Content from our partners
This article appears in the 05 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall Out