Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s latest, is a Frankenstein’s Monster of a movie, but one that fails to come to life.
Our titular iterative protagonist, hapless sad-sack Mickey (Robert Pattinson; endearing, like a naïfish Looney Tune), discovers that intergalactic travel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, when he realises he’s signed up to be an Expendable.
Think Duncan Jones’ Moon, but your job is, essentially, to die. Over and over, usually violently and painfully; whether as a lab rat for some unknown pathogen, or whatever else the excitable, easily-distracted science team can come up with it. After you’ve expired, they just “print” off another copy, complete with up-to-date memories.
Based on the book Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, this darkly satirical sci-fi premise seems a good fit for a director whose work often plays with the darker aspects of the meat-grinder that is modern capitalism. However, Mickey 17’s screenplay, written by Joon-ho, quickly loses interest in this. Apparently the themes of death, rebirth, and the uniqueness of human identity aren’t enough to be getting on with.
Instead, the film bait-and-switches into broad social satire, more in the Snowpiercer vein, as focus shifts to conflict with the egomaniacal mission leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, riffing on his preening performance in Poor Things), a Trumpian figure, and his equally caricaturish, culinary-obsessed wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), whose shameless, thoughtless politicking bring the colonists into conflict with a new species – think Starship Troopers with the subtext writ large.
The tight character focus is replaced by a sprawling allegory, the promise of some insight into the human condition – Mickey 18 is different from Mickey 17, what could that mean?! – with a lot of yelling.
In this, Mickey 17‘s apparent themes go largely unexplored. The satire doesn’t bite, the emotional heart doesn’t beat – Mickey’s relationship with Nasha (Naomi Ackie, bringing a lot of charisma to bear), alternating between nurturing and unstable gets lost in the mix. It ends up feeling like a pastiche of different science-fiction comedies, including some from Joon-ho’s own career; looking at you, Okja.
Stretched over 2¼, the occasional element that works – the recurring gag with the meat-printer jam, the Red Dwarf-style ship construction – gets lost in the mix. It feels like a product of 2018 Netflix, when they threw money at interesting directors to make overlong, seemingly first draft “passion projects”. The only consolation is thinking of WB CEO David Zaslav staring in horror at this, the follow-up to Best Picture winner Parasite; from a director with final cut, no less.
