Movie Review
Mickey 17
Directed by Bong Joon-ho

BONG JOON-HO’s latest film Mickey 17 is out and disappointing some folks — in part because it isn’t making the box office they’re hoping from the director of Parasite ($262 million worldwide from an $11 million budget), in part because it doesn’t have the sharp edge of Parasite with its literal upstairs-downstairs allegory or bloody melancholic finale. Basically the complaint I’m hearing is that it isn’t Parasite, which won a gold-plated Oscar doorstop for Best Picture, and that he should just do more of the same only better for the rest of his career.

And for the rest of us? Well lemme tell you…

When you mention Bong Joon-ho the key question isn’t really “which film?” as it is “which Bong?” He’s dabbled not just in different genres but different combinations of genres, from police-procedural noir (Memories of a Murder) to family drama turned noir (Mother) to indie comedies (Barking Dogs Never Bite) to creature feature turned family drama (The Host) to girl and pet pig turned dystopian adventure (Okja) to an adaptation of an action-adventure anime (Snowpiercer) to, yes, allegorical family comedies turned thrillers (Parasite).

Bong is what you might call a moving target, never satisfied with making the same picture twice, and I’m betting if anyone asked him what his most perfect work was he’d frown and ask you to repeat the question. Perfection implies practicing the same skills over and over till you’ve mastered them, and I doubt if he’s applied the same set of skills twice in any two productions; I don’t think he’s even interested in making anything perfect — he’s just too interested in moving on and doing something else.

So this: an English-language adaptation of Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton about Mickey Barnes, crew member on an expedition to the ice planet Niflheim — “7” because Mickey is an Expendable, assigned to take on the most dangerous assignments; every time he dies a new clone can be decanted with most if not all of his previous memories downloaded to his latest body (this is the seventh Mickey to be revived to date). The film’s title is Mickey 17 because, as Bong put it in an interview “I wanted to kill him 10 more times.”

You can see Bong’s point. I have not read the novel but have heard it called farcical, with plenty of long agonizing deaths described involving the various Mickeys. The original Barnes was lassoed into the role by the promise of immortality; the recruiter didn’t lie — you do get immortality of sorts, but the downsides are: 1.) all the various painful and often protracted ways in which you can get killed, and, 2.) your unofficial (though often vocally declared) status as the bottom rung on the expeditionary ship’s social ladder. Stretching Mickey’s career by an additional 10 deaths, Bong emphasizes the sense that Mickey has: 1.) gone through a lot more suffering, and, 2.) has had his ego battered down to the point where he’s actually disappointed when he doesn’t die in some horrific manner (“What’s the matter, my meat ain’t good enough for you?!”). This is the kind of pathos Chaplin might have achieved in his great silent comedies with his resourceful sad sack Tramp, if the Tramp ever adventured in science fiction (well, he did a bit in the first half of Modern Times, and did put his flesh literally on the line in The Gold Rush); Bong lunges at the same goals as Chaplin, helped by lively editing and voice over narration and a far bigger special-effects budget — he doesn’t succeed on the same level (of course) but does get there, more or less.

It helps that Bong has Robert Pattinson. Pattinson’s been trying to rehabilitate his image since his twinkly vampire days and the effort has largely worked, with his bearded explorer in James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, his hard-pressed smalltime crook in the Safdie brothers’ Good Time, his gritty greasy turn as lonely keeper in Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse (he’s also had a turn as The Batman but I’m still trying to forget the experience). Pattinson comes off as versatile and courageous, able and willing to try something, anything, as long as he can take it somewhere extreme; Bong must have seen this in him, had a long discussion with the actor, and confided his vision: “here in this my latest film, you must play someone sweet.”

And by golly Pattinson does. Mickey is perhaps the sweetest most likable character I’ve ever encountered in a Bong film, and the fact that he gets pummeled, frozen, incinerated, amputated by passing meteoroids, and exposed to various deadly gases, chemicals, microorganisms only serves to make his sweetness seem more heroic. A backstory I’m assuming Bong added to the film shows why he’s so motivated to flee the Earth and accept such a thankless job (it’s either this or a chainsaw) and also serves to show how this basically guileless man has been exploited by the less scrupulous all his life.

And Pattinson pulls it off with his softly mumbled cracked voice and constantly stricken eyes. He plays an almost purely good character and sells it, a difficult feat to pull off, and Bong as writer-director incidentally shows an understanding of goodness that even Dostoevsky doesn’t quite achieve.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not meaning to rank Bong above Dostoevsky. When it comes to flawed antiheroes and malevolent degenerates and vain buffoons and other underworld types the writer has no peer; when it comes to pure folk without a trace of malice in their bodies, his writing can be embarrassing, even (worse) dull. Dostoevsky’s sainted characters are one-note and unconvincing, possibly because he’s such a self-loathing heel he can’t bring himself to sully their angelic blankness; he hasn’t learned the lesson Bong practices, to sell a good person by adding the one grounding detail that makes him believable, in this case Mickey’s intelligence. He’s not the sharpest knife on the ship, he knows it, he accepts it, and folks around him — and in the audience — want to throw their arms around him and protect him just because.

The film isn’t a one-man show; Bong surrounds Pattinson’s Mickey with a range of comic foils, from Mark Ruffalo’s Trumpish Kenneth Marshall — a failed politician turned expedition leader — to Toni Collette’s Ylfa Marshall – the manipulative politician’s wife and culinary snob — to Steven Yeun’s slippery Timo — Mickey’s best friend and most relentless exploiter — to Mickey himself, or rather Mickey 18, who was reprinted by accident and now hopes to replace 17 in the scheme of things. The scenes of 17 and 18 arguing are some of the funniest in the film; unfortunately, 18 may also be the film’s most serious flaw — he’s meant to be a darker more aggressive version of 17, only his role is so woefully underwritten we don’t quite buy the eventual trajectory of his character arc.

Gotta mention Naomie Ackie as Nasha, security agent and one of the few crewmembers to notice and stand by Mickey through his 18 various incarnations. Nasha stays mainly in the background (except for the moments when she’s suddenly spectacularly physical — security agent, remember?) and manages to be the exception to the rule: the purely good character who manages to make you believe in her because, well, she just is.

The film has a consistently grungy textured look; even the digital effects — mainly the alien creatures found on Niflheim, deftly mixed with animatronic models — convey the solidity and unified feel of a film with a definite mood, of exhausted blue-collar slobs trying to earn their paychecks without getting killed by either their machinery or the harsh environments they work in. That look, mainly by legendary cinematographer Darius Khondji, adds a dimension to the picture, arguably the handsomest Bong has done to date; also contrasts nicely with the frozen inferno of Neflheim, all vast tundras and perilous deadfalls and endless howling wind; the creatures (designed by Bong and longtime collaborator Jan Hee-chul) manage to look both moistly disgusting and unaccountably cute at the same time.

Is this Bong’s best work to date? I don’t know; I’ve said it isn’t perfect, that Bong doesn’t even try for perfection. I do think it’s overstuffed, ambitious, flings various things at the wall in the hope some of it sticks, and that a surprising amount does; the film does this trick of skittering across various genres and emotional tones throughout the entire running time, even within certain scenes, keeping its balance with more dexterity than you might expect — but then Bong has apparently been doing this sort of thing for some time, years even. You might even say he’s had practice.