After the Oscar-winning success of Parasite, director Bong Joon Ho was essentially given a blank check by Warner Bros. to make his next film, Mickey 17. It ended up costing a whopping $118 million. He might’ve benefited from a tighter budget.
Not that Mickey 17 is bad. Bong doesn’t do bad movies. But it’s definitely over stuffed. The film is bursting with satirical ideas, exploring Bong’s favorite themes—the oppression of the poor, the callousness of the rich, and the dehumanizing hierarchies formed even among the underclass. All good themes—and he deployed them masterfully in Parasite, one of the best films of the past decade. Here, however, he also throws in imperialism, cruelty to animals (another pet theme), and a rather broad caricature of Donald Trump, undoubtedly the weakest part of the film.
I wish he had stuck with his main, brilliant premise. In the year 2050, hapless Mickey (Robert Pattison) and his squirrely business partner Timo (Steven Yeun) escape a sadistic loan shark by flying to newly colonized planet, run by a garish, Trump-like TV host/wannabe dictator, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo). There, Mickey accidentally signs up to be something called an Expendable, meaning he gets killed on the regular and then “reprinted” with his exact same body and all his memories downloaded.
When we first meet Mickey, he’s in the midst of one of those “freeze frame, record scratch, yep, that’s me” moments, at the bottom of a giant cave, covered in snow and ice. He’s upset that the fall didn’t kill him and considers how painful freezing to death might be. Then Timo shows up—not to save him, but to steal his flamethrower. “You were going to die anyway,” Timo says, with a shrug. “See you tomorrow.”
Through flashbacks, we find out about Mickey’s role on the planet Niflheim. He’s the guy to test things out: The effects of radiation exposure, the efficacy of a vaccine, the body’s reaction to extreme cold or heat. Once he dies, his body is thrown into a firepit and he’s recycled—good as new.
Along the way, he has somehow managed to find himself a loyal girlfriend, Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who accepts his rather unusual lifestyle.
Robert Pattinson plays Mickey with a nasal, sad-sack voice, possibly inspired by Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy. He’s a passive, unassuming, and dutiful to a fault, never once rebelling against or even questioning his bottom-feeder role in the ecosystem. (Although he hates when people ask him what it feels like to die—which they do constantly. It freaking hurts.) That is, until the emergence of Mickey 18.
You see, the scientists running the Expendable program assumed Mickey 17 died in that cave and took it upon themselves to print out a new one. But Mickey manages to survive and suddenly he’s confronted with, well, himself. But a slightly different version of himself: more surly, more defiant, and rather annoyed with his doormat of a counterpart. This second Mickey—Mickey 18—is something called a Multiple and they are forbidden on Niflheim. The punishment? Death—for both of them.
All this is served up with dark humor and style by Bong and co.—and Pattinson positively relishes his dual role as the markedly different Mickeys. But as I mentioned there’s just too much. Ruffalo’s grotesque caricature of Trump—replete with fake tan, fake teeth, and a coterie of boot-licking underlings—is, frankly, too on the nose.
And Tony Colette as his rapacious wife—the very embodiment of “Let Them Eat Cake”—is also lacking even the tiniest bit of subtlety. (She’s obsessed with sauces, which she views to be the hallmark of any civilized society—meanwhile, all the have-nots on Niflheim eat gruel.) And then there are the sandworm-like creatures that inhabit the planet—the ones who were there first. They play a rather outsized role in the film’s final act and are helped by a convenient translating machine that allows Mickey to converse with them.
Look, there’s lots I liked about Mickey 17. And as it, I feel like it has the makings of a cult classic—a dystopian space comedy/adventure with shades of Terry Gilliam. If they had just cut the budget in half, they might’ve really been onto something.