There are a few success stories to be celebrated in Mickey 17, the new film from Parasite director Bong Joon-ho. The first concerns Bong himself, who has managed to make an expensive, completely original sci-fi movie in an era where any film that costs over $100 must be part of some greater cinematic universe. It's beyond refreshing to watch a movie with this kind of story — one with clones, spaceships and alien slugs — have original characters, an original world, and an original style. You can compare Mickey 17 to other movies, but it's still something new. It wasn't setting itself up for a sequel, and I was never sure where the story was headed for the whole of its two hours and 17 minutes. It know I'm setting the bar for positivity low here, but movies like Mickey 17 are rare enough these days that they're worth checking out for the novelty alone.
The other big success story is Robert Pattinson's. A decade ago, Robert Pattison was the Twilight guy, the sparkly vampire, the hunky monster man. Not that there's anything wrong with being the Twilight guy; some actors should be so lucky to be forever associated with a hit franchise. But Pattinson wanted more. He worked with daring directors beloved by film buffs, people like David Cronenberg (Cosmopolis), Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse) and Christopher Nolan (Tenet). He built himself up not just as a movie star but as a serious actor willing to take risks. It makes perfect sense that he'd team up with Bong Joon-ho, one of the few major directors working today who's managing to tell original stories that also put butts in seats. And he's done it by playing a variety of different characters rather than by finding a brand and clinging to it for dear life.
Pattinson plays multiple characters even within Mickey 17. We meet him as Mickey Barnes, a working class stiff who needs to get as far away as possible before he's chopped to bits by a nasty loan shark. He volunteers to join a voyage to a faraway planet as an "Expendable," meaning he can be sent out on dangerous missions or endure deadly experiments that may (and do) kill him. When he dies, his body is reprinted and his consciousness re-uploaded, making it as though he never left.
But Mickey remembers dying each of the 16 times it's happened, and he's never gotten used to it. Pattinson is a million miles from Bruce Wayne as the twitchy, nasal-voiced Mickey. A bit of a doormat, Mickey is used to being treated as expendable by the people on the ship, especially Captain Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo doing a mild Trump impression), a failed politician who wants to move to a new planet and remake it in his image. The exception is his girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who has stuck with him through each iteration. When an eighteenth version of Mickey is accidentally printed while Mickey 17 is still alive, she's excited she gets to have two of him.
To tell them apart, Nasha marks their chests with the numbers "17" and "18," but she needn't have bothered. Each version of Mickey is a little different, and number 18 seems like the most different of all; where Mickey 17 is pliant and nervous, Mickey 18 is brash and trigger-happy. Pattinson furrows his brow and lowers his voice to play 18, and there was never a doubt in my mind which one I was looking at.
For a while, I thought Mickey 18 might be the villain of the piece; maybe the movie would be about Mickey fighting his own nature. Around the time Nasha tried to initiate history's weirdest threesome, I thought she might be an obstacle; maybe the movie is cynical all the way to the core, and Mickey was entirely alone. At one point we meet a race of space alien slug people who are smarter than they seem; are they friend or foe?
But in the end, this is a Bong Joon-ho movie, and I should have realized from the start that the baddies are the egomaniacal Kenneth Marshall and his selfish wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), who is horrified when her husband is about to shoot Mickey 17...because it will get blood on her nice rug. Themes of class warfare run through Bong Joon-ho's work, most prominently in Snowpiercer and Parasite. In Mickey 17, the Marshalls are every inch the callous, frivolous ruling class who dine on succulent steak and sleep in feather beds while the crew eats space slop and shivers in cots. But the movie doesn't drill down on the theme in the way that Parasite does. Between the loan shark plotline, the alien slug people, the Mickey-vs-Mickey clash, and the sex comedy, there's too much else going on.
Mickey 17 is surprisingly plot-heavy, especially at the top. There's a lot of lore to establish before the story really gets going; the title card doesn't show up until 20 minutes into the movie. You could argue that it's overstuffed, but I liked how I could rarely tell where it was going next. And all the elements come together nicely for the climax; the movie plays fair.
In the end, Mickey 17 is optimistic in a way that felt relevant and timely; the megalomaniacal tyrants get what's coming to them, dangerous technology is cast aside, and the different peoples on the planet try to live in harmony. Is that the way it will work out for us? I don't know, but I like that Bong Joon-ho built a world where it does and entertained me while doing it.
Grade: B+
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