After 6 long years since his best picture-winning film, Parasite, Bong Joon-ho has finally returned with a new film carrying many of the same themes and social commentary he is known for. Mickey 17, written and directed by Joon-ho, does succeed at upping the ante from its predecessor in its scale. But does the film replicate the quality of Parasite like a flawless clone, or will it deliver a painful death to Joon-ho’s filmmaking career? Let’s blast off into the cosmos and find out!
The film stars many well-known actors, with the two stand-outs being Robert Pattinson, who plays the titular Mickey and all of his iterative clones, and Mark Ruffalo, who plays the antagonist, Kenneth Marshall. Pattinson is genuinely the best part of the film, as he displays excellent range and emotion, playing the multiple versions of Mickey with an energetic sincerity. Whether the character was experiencing the wonders of the universe or being unjustly abused and tormented, he always looked like he was having fun with the role and gave it his all. In contrast, Ruffalo’s performance as Kenneth Marshall felt more like a stale caricature than an actual character with depth or coherent motivations. This is largely due to the fact that he is doing more of an impression of a certain well-known politician than he is playing an original character, making the film feel, at times, more like an SNL skit than a big-budget cinematic experience.
The plot is centered around Mickey joining Marshall’s crew on a spaceship where he is an “expendable” who dies regularly for their cause and is subsequently cloned over and over. It is a brilliant premise for a dark comedy sci-fi social commentary, but they barely do anything interesting with the premise. The first half hour does a good job setting up the world and introduces an intriguing conflict when Mickey survives a near-death experience and comes face-to-face with an accidental clone of himself. With this inciting incident, the film is seemingly setting up an interesting conflict with some potentially profound social commentary about the disposableness of the working class in society but quickly abandons this plotline to tell a completely different story about colonialism and animal rights.
This storytelling whiplash results in a film that is tonally all over the place, never knowing what it wants to take seriously or make a joke out of. The pacing is atrocious and slows down so much in the middle that the viewing experience becomes boring and monotonous, with the ending of the film dragging on and on insufferably. Characters come in and out of the story at random and don’t add anything of substance, making the narrative bloated and messy. The film isn’t even able to save itself from these pitfalls with an important message since the satire is heavy-handed and feels like it was written by a high schooler who only has basic knowledge of how the world works.
Unfortunately, Joon-ho was not able to replicate the success of Parasite, which was already a tall order as-is. However, he still shows through this film that he is an ambitious filmmaker, even though this one didn’t work well. Perhaps his career can still be revived in the same way that Mickey was 17 times.
