Similar, but nothing familiar.
One of my movie ideas 20 years ago was going to be an interstellar journey very similar to Mickey 17. It was about a machine that could clone a human mind, put it into a machine, and send it into space far, far away. These clones would go to a dangerous planet to save the president’s daughter, and the best person they could find for the job was a college professor not prepared to have the speed and strength of a T-800.
They made five of these robots, and when one died, the memories were sent back and inserted into the next machine. When the professor completed the job, he dies in a sacrificial gesture and returns with no memory of what he did deep in space, but he can analyze the data and figure out what choices he likely made and why. “Huh. I don’t think I could have done this any better myself.”
If this idea — sort of John Carpenter’s Escape From New York via James Cameron’s Avatar and Terminator — had been turned into Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, how happy would I be with the final product? What type of grade would I give myself?
Firstly, Mickey 17 is an original idea that doesn’t seem quite like anything else I have seen, even in my imagination. A few movies that informed this one: Looper, The Edge of Tomorrow, Arrival, and Pitch Black. What genre does that sound like? Sci-fi? Sure, but is it funny? Scary? Intense?
Mickey 17 is a very satisfying drama that teased being a true genre picture, but Bong Joon Ho does not push it in that direction. His first theatrical motion picture after his “best film of the twenty-first century,” Parasite, has him returning to Snowpiercer and Okja mode.
Based on a novel, Mickey 17 probably had him saying, “Cute alien monsters. An icy planet? These are my tropes. I can do this.” The marketing gave me the strong impression this would be a thriller/horror — one where a multitude of Mickey Barnes would duke it out in a battle royale, Hunger Games-style. But the actual story is small.
Mickey is an expendable, a worker who doesn’t realize the position means dying over and over again. Someone higher up goes to the ice planet to save his flamethrower but leaves him to die — it’s not in the budget to save them both. Mickey 17 miraculously survives and returns unscathed. This now makes Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 “multiples,” which, because of politics and religion, makes them eligible for permanent deletion. No more clones. Just death.
Hollywood would be salivating over turning this premise into a thriller spectacle, but Bong resists anything YA-novel-ish. It feels very literary in execution, as if a novel was deemed unfilmable and he just wanted to shoot it as is. Bong actually made a lot of changes, but overall it felt like a story most fun to read, savoring Mickey’s prose before finding where the plot lands next.
The best part is the characterizations. Robert Pattinson, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo all give extremely affected, almost stilted performances, considering who we know they are. But I can’t point to another character like the total sum of their personalities or what they represent.
The movie is extremely nuanced, and Bong avoids a single cliché or archetype when painting a world of colorful, believable characters. The same goes for the supporting cast. This world feels applicable to modern workplace situations. It’s easy to imagine saying, “You are such a Mickey,” or “Our boss is such a Kenneth.” The premise isn’t 100% believable or logical, but there is real wisdom behind how the characters interact.
Robert Pattinson has come a long way as a performer. Mickey speaks like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, explaining the ins and outs of being an expendable with a strange but memorable Brooklyn accent. He commits from beginning to end. It’s not transformative acting, but it’s unforgettably distinct.
The performances and ideas in the script are the best I’ve seen this year. To be honest, my old script idea was more obvious studio shock than this (though I might still turn into a Hollywood screenplay one day). The mechanic of taking the “extra lives” part of video games and inserting it into philosophy still excites me, but Bong Joon Ho reminds me: “Make something truly new if you can. Actually be happy with what you did, for yourself.”
It took five and a half long years after Parasite (almost) swept the Oscars for him to release a kinda funny movie about clones and cute alien monsters. Mickey 17 might be a B+ of a movie, but it’s one I’ll reference for many years.
8.5/10
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