With President Donald Trump back in the White House, all kinds of media and art will feel like it's commenting on him and his supporters. Some of it will be subtle; Bong Joon Ho's Mickey 17 is not.
The celebrated director of the scathing satire Parasite returns with a parable set in a future where Earth is a man-made global disaster. There, a failed politician, who has a penchant for pursing his lips when he makes proclamations, launches a spaceship, stocked with many of his devoted followers. They don red baseball caps embroidered with his motto and hope to create a "pure planet" in the stars.
It's blunt. And honestly, the similarities to America under Trump might hurt any hope for escapism. But notably, Mickey 17 isn't named for the narcissistic billionaire that is its villain. This heart-wrenching and inventive adventure is named for the average Joe who dumb-lucked himself onto a spaceship and into a massive change of fate.
Robert Pattinson brings Jackass appeal to Mickey 17.
The backdrop to Mickey 17 is one of global politics, economic inequality, and fearmongering as a recruiting tool. But the core of the story is a good-hearted doofus named Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson). Fleeing a merciless loan shark, Mickey takes any job he can to get off-planet, signing up to be an "expendable" without reading the fine print on his contract. What he's consented to is to become the space colony's one-man crash test dummy. He'll be killed over and over in the name of science, only to be printed out again, with all his memories (of life and death) intact.
Despite dying being a pretty common part of his routine, Mickey builds a life with the live-wire soldier Nasha (Blink Twice's Naomi Ackie). But after a mission gone weird, he returns to their bed to find not just his lover but another him. Mickey 18 (also played by Pattinson) was printed because the crew assumed Mickey 17 was dead. More bad news: "Multiples" have a bad reputation, which means their simultaneous existence could lead to them both being killed for good, with no more human printings.
Like Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow (aka Live Die Repeat), Pattinson plays the clown in a daffy death montage, softening the blow of his repeated demise with a mix of physical comedy and a playful score of plinking piano and swooning strings. But where Cruise's army PR man was a cocky son-of-a-bitch, Pattinson's Mickey 17 is a real Jackass.
In an interview with Empire, Pattison said that he'd attempted to mimic Jackass star Steve-O and Johnny Knoxville in his dual roles of Mickeys 17 and 18, but Bong shot the idea down. Still, fans of the stunts-and-shenanigans franchise might well still hear Steve-O in Pattison's raspy but open-hearted tone. And it's a smart allusion, subtly calling Generation X and millennials to remember the lovable goofball who'd risk his own neck (or nutsack) to please others. It's not that Mickey thinks of himself as noble in his human guinea-pigging. He's just happy to be of use, having little thought he's good for much else. By contrast, Mickey 18 is abrasive and volatile, less inclined to bend a knee to the powers that be. To survive, they must either join forces or turn on each other. And their decisions causes an electrifying upheaval in their space colony.
Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette give Trump with a hint of Okja.
The two critically acclaimed performers are smartly paired as the braggadocious Kenneth Marshall and his right-hand wife Ylfa. Where the spaceship's inhabitants eat rationed gray sludge and wear uniforms to match, these two relish their lofty status and obscene wealth, dressing in flashy suits bedecked with shiny rivets or dresses so snug and violently colored they're a visual ambush. Like he did in the sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer and the fantasy caper Okja, Bong draws a dramatic contrast between the haughty haves, who feel their desires are exactly what they are owed no matter the human cost, and the gruff but lovable have-nots, who are expected to endure on sludge and scraps.
Ruffalo embraces the buffoonery of this political performance, wearing distractingly white veneers as he mimics Trump's signature sneer and mercurial nature. Collette's Ylfa is less obviously tied to contemporary American politics. However, her fixation on luxuries — like ornate furnishings and exotic sauces — reflects the consumeristic colonialism that Bong openly condemns across his work. There's a willful lunacy in these heightened portrayals, where the caustic couple urges each other to grisly acts of violence in the name of their planetary conquest. And yet, for as far-flung in the future as Mickey 17 is set, it doesn't feel that far away.
Mickey 17 isn't a playbook of resistance but a parable of hope.
When cultures clash in Bong's movies, they often do so with dark humor and some juicy genre spectacle, a kind of candy-coating to make the medicine go down more easily. Mickey 17 himself is a sugary-sweet hero, whose softness is outright derided by more cynical members of the crew. Yet, this cavalcade of clashing crew mates — including Ackie, Steven Yeun, and Patsy Ferran — bring their own tasty charms through scenes involving kinky sex, party drugs, and animal noises. Then all this is folded into an alien world, where the natives are a compelling cross between pill bugs and elephants, soft and scurrying yet potentially powerful. Unexpectedly, they become a clever mirror of Mickey 17, underestimated but ultimately extraordinary. And in that is the lesson.
Mickey 17 is not hard or smart or even particularly special. He's an average dope who has been snookered by one bad deal after another. But in Mickey 17, he is the hero, thrown into an extraordinary circumstance that challenges him to adapt or die. But adapting doesn't demand becoming hard like 18. And in that Bong offers a ray of hope for those opposing a brutal authority.
The journey Mickey goes on is winding and wild, bucking the conventional flow of a sci-fi action movie, by being only gently sci-fi and barely action. Instead, Mickey 17 plays as a political comedy with cross-genre flare, ultimately urging the audience to see the similarities, and perhaps find our own inner Mickey 17.
