Mickey17 is weirdo sci-fi that takes big swings in the way that only Director Bong Joon-ho can. It’s a black comedy exploring the evils of late-stage capitalism, the human desire to be led (and often by the wrong people), and, at its core, what it actually means to be human.
Set in the future where technological advances have made way for human printers, Mickey17 sees humanity abandoning the Earth in favour of branching out into the stars and creating a new home. Earth you see, is a fixer upper, and nobody wants to do the work. Instead, an easier and cleaner solution is to start new colonies on ‘vanilla, virgin’ worlds, according to Mark Ruffalo’s Trumpian Kenneth Marshall.
Mickey finds himself on the wrong side of a loan shark after his pal Timo (Stevn Yeun) convinces him to take out a loan to fund a Macaron store; they will be bigger than burgers, don’t you know? With no way to pay and a grisly fate looming over them, both Timo and Mickey enlist in Marshall’s mission to Planet Niflheim to start over. Marshall himself is fleeing Earth having lost two consecutive elections. And so, this expedition is led and crewed by desperate people looking for a way out, looking for meaning and looking for something new.
Mickey17 Review
Tonally, Mickey17‘s closest companion amongst Bong Joon-ho’s ouvre is Snowpiercer. It takes a similar view of capitalism, leadership and the role of the worker. Of course, there’s also the snow and the dystopian vision of our future, but that’s just window dressing. Beyond that, both Snowpiercer and Mickey17 are pitch black at the core, taking dim views of where we currently are as a species and similarly, where we may go. Marshall stands in for any charismatic leader able to sway the masses without having their best intentions at heart. Sure, it’s easy to compare Marshall to the current US President, and based on Ruffalo’s performance, intentional, but Marshall is also a religious zealot and could just as easily be compared to a mega-church pastor or cult leader.
Mickey17 posits that when people are led by someone such as this, our worst, most base instincts are what rise to the surface. The way we treat those we consider “expendable” and what we’ll do to cement our own legacy and save our own skins.
Micky himself, on the other hand, is a bit of a wide-eyed innocent. Drawn into Timo’s failing schemes, Mickey is a good guy with very little luck. Robert Pattinson’s performance as Mickey is strange and nuanced and wonderful. He affects a nasal accent somewhere in the realm of Joe Pesci (with less rage) and plays Mickey as though he were Jerry Smith (Rick and Morty) come to life. He’s quiet and accepts his pathetic life and on more than one occasion gets told he’s “soft.” And while Timo scored himself a plum job as a pilot, Mickey signs on to be an Expendable, without even realising what that actually is.
With human printing being possible, exploring works has been taken to all new levels. What this means for Mickey is that his memories are stored on a literal brick and he is used as a lab-rat, guinea pig, labour and meat puppet over and over again, and when he dies, a new Mickey is printed. Mickey17 takes great pains to explain that the “ink” for printing new Mickeys is made up of all the waste on board the ship; food scraps, dead bodies, excrement. It all goes towards building a new Mickey. He is literal shit and that’s how most of the crew sees him. Less than.
Early in Mickey17 we’re treated to a montage of Mickey’s deaths as the science team use him in the name of science. It’s grim and gruesome if you think too hard on it, but Bong Joon-ho keeps the pace quick and the mood light even as you watch Mickey’s severed hand float in space or his skin slough off from a deadly gas or watch as he coughs up litres of blood over and over again. The film wants you to see Mickey as a person even though nearly everyone around him sees him as a thing.
I say nearly everyone because Security Agent Nasha (Naomi Ackie) takes a shine to Mickey and is the one bright spot amongst his endless days of death, torture and pain. She sees him as a real person and not just a means to an end, and their love and relationship is one of the few bright spots in Mickey17’s dark tapestry of woe.
Saying all of that, Mickey17 is hilarious. I laughed out loud on multiple occasions and, in general, it’s a ridiculously funny film. Like other works by Bong Joon-ho, it has a cartoonish quality to it and often feels like an anime brought to life. Everyone in the cast is doing stellar work, but Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette are both clearly loving the opportunity to bite, chew, swallow and digest the scenery. They are ridiculous and delicious in every scene.
Visually, Mickey17 is a spectacle and Bong Joon-ho’s confident direction allows the complex and often confusing narrative to shine. However, this is not a perfect film and those big swings I mentioned at the beginning, not all of them connect.
Mickey17 often feels disjointed and sometimes rushed despite its 137-minute runtime. It’s clear that a lot has been cut and so we’re left with dangling plot threads that are never tied up or tied up too conveniently and quickly in the film’s strange and overlong coda. The tone is occasionally jarring and there are moments where scenes feel piled up against one another yet not a lot is happening. It’s a strange collection of ideas and visuals that mostly works, but not always.
Does this make Mickey17 a bad film? Not by any stretch of the imagination. I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to Niflheim and will tag along anywhere Bong Joon-ho wants to take me.
Leo Stevenson attended a screening of Mickey17 as a guest of Warner Bros Australia.
