Mickey 17 Is a Misbegotten Sci-Fi Trump Satire
Robert Pattinson stars as spacefaring multiples in director Bong Joon-ho's disappointing follow-up to Parasite.
It's hard to make a smart science fiction movie—and even harder to make a smart sci-fi movie that is also a funny, audaciously bizarre, and pointedly political satire that is somehow still grounded in romance and real human feeling. I can think of one such movie—Brazil, the laugh-out-loud, incredibly bleak, epically romantic 1980s satire directed by Monty Python alum Terry Gilliam. If there's a runner-up, it's 12 Monkeys, also directed by Gilliam.
So on the one hand, I want to give director Bong Joon-ho credit for trying with Mickey 17—his smirking, strange, frantically wacky sci-fi romance political satire about an "expendable," a man whose job is to die repeatedly, and then be organically printed back into life in order to help a colony ship. The Oscar-winning director of Parasite, as well as cult sci-fi films Snowpiercer and The Host, has combined science fiction and politically engaged satire before, sometimes with excellent results. But the stilted, misbegotten Mickey 17 doesn't work as well as his prior efforts. Yes, it's ambitious, and it's hard to truly dislike this movie. But let's just say that Bong Joon-ho is no Terry Gilliam.
Unfortunately for a long-awaited follow-up to a groundbreaking Oscar winner, Mickey 17 is something of a disappointment. Part of the problem is that the movie's attempts at political satire come across as a little too of-the-moment—or, perhaps, of a recent moment now passed. The movie's release was delayed for about a year, which significantly dampens some of the intended topical humor.
See, Mickey 17 takes place mostly on a spaceship that has settled on an ice planet. The ship is led by Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a blustering, arrogant, camera-hogging dolt of a politician who confuses religion with corporations and leaves Earth, in part, over a dispute about losing an election. Ruffalo plays Marshall with a bug-eyed cartoon egoism, which is bolstered by support from his wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), who, if anything is even more of a cartoon cutout. Ruffalo's performance is energetically wacky enough to hold some attention, but it's also distracting. Every time Marshall graces the screen, the movie descends into a clodding, off-the-mark Donald Trump farce that's predicated on the idea of political sore-loserdom. Turns out science fiction movies aren't very good at predicting the future.
Would the movie have landed better if it had been released a year ago? Well, it certainly would have hit differently. But even aside from the flat political satire, the movie has underlying structural problems.
Much of the first hour is just a narrated exposition, told in voiceover from the perspective of the title character, Mickey 17, the seventeenth iteration of the ready-to-die-and-die-again expendable played by Robert Pattinson. Pattinson gives Mickey a funny voice and an amusingly awkward demeanor, finding sly humor in off-rhythm line readings. And when Mickey 18 inevitably arrives on the scene, he plays a comically brutish second version of himself, letting the earlier Mickey act as the straight man. But there's so much narration and so little action—especially in what should be a climactic third-act pitting humans against a native animal species that may or may not be friendly—that the movie sometimes has the feel of a slideshow or a book report on what the movie was supposed to be.
What the movie was supposed to be was an adaptation of Mickey 7, the enjoyably compact and engaging novel by Edward Ashton. Ashton's book isn't quite as successful as, say, Brazil, but it's an enjoyable and fairly effective sci-fi political satire with a romantic backbone. It's also more successful than the film adaptation in considering the philosophical implications of a world in which humans can be printed and reprinted again and again, with memories and personalities recorded and imprinted each time. Would a death really be a death? Would each new version of a person be the same person—or something slightly but meaningfully different? Does every copy of Robert Pattinson doing a funny voice deserve dignity? OK, the book doesn't quite get at that last question, but it actually wrestles with the ethical and political consequences of copy-and-print humans, whereas the film adaptation merely gestures at them before pivoting to what amounts to Trump snark.
It's not a terrible movie, exactly: The digital effects work is refreshingly excellent, the cinematography by the legendary Darius Khnodji is as good as ever, and there's enough on-screen chaos and calamity and outright weirdness that the movie never becomes dull. But if I want a funny movie about a man who ends up with multiples of himself, I'll watch Michael Keaton in Multiplicity. In the meantime, Mickey…Mickey…you're, eh, just fine.
