Read the fine print. That seems to be the message of this season’s movies. The villain of Companion trips himself up because he fails to read the user agreement of his companion robot, and the hero of Mickey 17 signs up for a job he doesn’t want because he doesn’t read the application. So begins Bong Joon-ho’s English-language follow-up to his Oscar-winning Parasite, which is a welcome taste of this filmmaker’s unique blend of science fiction with outrageous comedy on a large scale.
Based on Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7, the film begins with Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) and his best friend Timo (Steven Yeun) getting deep into debt with Earth mobsters after a bad investment in a macaron business. They escape by joining a space expedition led by failed Congressman Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) to colonize the frozen wasteland planet of Niflheim.
Not since Snowpiercer have we seen Bong work on a Hollywood budget, and this surpasses even his 2013 masterpiece in terms of visual scale, as we see a queue of potential space workers proceeding up a concourse that spirals at least six stories up. Niflheim’s creatures (which are dubbed “creepers”) are described by Marshall’s wife (Toni Collette) as “croissants dipped in shit,” though I’d say they’re closer to woolly mammoths crossed with water bugs. As we’ve seen from The Host and Okja, Bong loves his giant exotic creatures the way Guillermo del Toro loves big-ass insects.
Unfortunately, because he skipped over the fine print, Mickey has agreed to be cloned over and over so that his doubles can do the most hazardous jobs on the trip, so when the 17th version of Mickey falls into an icy crevasse on Niflheim, Timo cheerfully leaves him to die. When 17 makes it back to the spaceship, he sees the 18th Mickey lying in his bed. He screams like a little girl, while 18 responds by bashing him in the head with a free weight. Reacting differently to the situation is Mickey’s girlfriend (Naomi Ackie), a soldier whose duty is to shoot any duplicates on sight but who’s more intrigued by the possibilities of having three-way sex with them. I don’t know, is that cheating?
Bong’s typically wacky sense of humor cuts against all the visual flair, as Marshall’s propaganda minister (Tim Key) spends the entire film dressed in a pigeon costume. Marshall himself harbors dreams of racial purity in his colony, wears too much bronzer, and describes everything as “beautiful” and “magnificent,” which is Bong’s revenge on the president who bragged about not having watched Parasite. The director also delivers a funny montage of Mickeys 12-16 dying from various diseases on Niflheim — a disposal worker notes that one of them is still alive, but that Mickey mumbles, “Nah, it’s fine,” so the sanitation guys pitch him into a incandescent slag pit for recycling. The Mickeys themselves are both stupid in ways that affect the plot, and much of the humor comes from most of the characters being incredibly obvious about stuff. When 18 tries to kill Timo with a glowing metal rod from the slag pit, Timo reacts: “Wow, that is like, really red! Isn’t that kinda hot?”
Nothing works in this futuristic techno-utopia. The 3D printer that produces the clones keeps getting stuck, technicians and security guards fall asleep at their jobs, and a cafeteria worker feeds Mickey through a garden hose that spews a silvery goo onto his lunch tray. Food is a recurring theme in Bong’s films, and it’s the center of a splendid comic set piece when Mickey is a guest of honor at a dinner party given by Marshall, and he’s served a disgusting lab-grown filet mignon that looks like a bright-red Jell-O mold that hasn’t set properly. He has a bad reaction to the dish, so Marshall’s scientists inject him with an experimental painkiller that sends him into convulsions. “It isn’t working,” says the main scientist, in another instance of characters being incredibly obvious.
I’m afraid this movie suffers from a pacing problem that I haven’t encountered with Bong’s other films, as the climactic encounter between Marshall and the queen of the creepers drags out way too long, although there is a clever bit with the creepers’ method of camouflaging their queen’s location. Mickey 17 is much better at raising laughs than at treating its underlying serious issues, but then, I can use a science-fiction movie that looks as good as either of the Dune films but is much funnier. How many Oscar-winning directors would let themselves be this silly on this big a budget? Bong does, which is why we cherish him.
Mickey 17
Starring Robert Pattinson and Naomi Ackie. Written and directed by Bong Joon-ho, based on Edward Ashton’s novel. Rated R.
