Perhaps you’ve had this relatively innocuous fantasy: that one day you’d have a chance to sit in front of people holding all the world’s wealth and power like so much Monopoly money… and tell them exactly what you thought of them. How cruel you thought they were, how woefully malicious, how pathetic, but more so, how absurdly and unforgivably stupid they were. How their view of the world and other people was bankrupt beyond reckoning.
Just me, huh?
Kidding—I know I’m not the only person with this desire. It’s a petty one, perhaps, but much needed during times that we label with underserving words: Tumultuous. Horrific. Uncertain.
Mickey 17 is a fascinating new chapter in the work of writer-director Bong Joon-ho. It has much in common, at least thematically, with his adaptation of Snowpiercer and with Okja, though I’d argue its complexities manage to outstrip both. It follows the trials of Mickey 17—the seventeenth iteration of one Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), who elects to become an “expendable” on a colony ship to a planet called Niflheim. Mickey’s desperation to board this ship comes after a failed business venture that sees his life threatened by a loan shark; he doesn’t read the fine print for the job, which indicates that he will be used on the most dangerous missions during the voyage and “reprinted” every time his life ends. His brain is scanned weekly and uploaded to ensure his memories are preserved.
The printing aspect is delightfully literal in this case, for anyone who remembers the old dot matrix models. Complete with funny little stop-starts and the tugging back and forth.
The film is a triumph on multiple fronts, but perhaps one of my favorites is how the story unravels. The script is a true master class on what to reveal to your audience and also how and when. Little details are withheld until the right moment in order to hit just right. The opening is incredibly lengthy for a feature film (if you like how Deadpool movies setup, you will love this), but that drawn out introduction works to submerge its viewers entirely. Pattinson is doing his utmost to weave a career of idiosyncratic performances the likes of which is rarely seen, and he’s perfectly grounded in this role(s). Specifically, the viscera of occupying a body, particularly one frequently put back together from detritus of living material, occupies every frame of this journey.
Someone needs to create a little course on how Bong loves using “waste” material for the purpose of creation, right? How decay fuels life? And maybe another little course on the depiction of disability and class within his oeuvre. I should stop before this review becomes a recommendation list of little classes.
One on his use of comedy to help audiences process heinous acts.
Sorry.
The colony ship is led by erstwhile politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette). While unpopular on Earth, Marshall and his wife use the colony trip to gather up vocal supporters and fine specimens of humanity in their desire to create a faith-based and “pure” human colony that will rely only on sexual procreation to create the next generation. (If just reading that made you twitch, you know exactly what all of this is meant to invoke.) This is at comical odds with the fact that the four-and-a-half year journey to reach the planet demands a reduced consumption of calories in order to keep everyone fed: No one is supposed to have sex in that period.
But Mickey finds himself a girlfriend in the security sector named Nasha (Naomi Ackie), and they proceed to ignore that mandate with gusto, creativity, and hand-drawn position charts. It’s charming to see a vote for sexual exploration as a valid form of rebellion and protest right out the gate, but that’s only the start of what we’re about to unearth.
The real trouble begins when Mickey is presumed dead on one of his early missions on Niflheim; the planet turns out to be home to a native species that Marshall creatively names “creepers,” and Mickey appears to get eaten by a hoard of them. In reality, they rescue him, dragging him from a deadly crevasse to the surface. Trouble is, Mickey was gone a whole day; another version of him was printed. Mickey 18 is here, and “multiples” are strictly forbidden.
The trailers for the film might have got audiences thinking that this was the purpose of the entire story, this question around multiples and who gets to be the “real” Mickey when all is said and done. But this isn’t what Mickey 17 is aiming for at all. Instead we’re left with newer and more interesting questions that power the rest of the tale—you see, Mickey 18 is angry. He’s not content to allow their continued mistreatment, and he means to do something about it.
In any other science fiction narrative, this story would then become about how there was something clearly wrong with this new Mickey, but no… we’re not going there either. Mickey 17 informs the audience (he’s the film’s narrator, by the way) that Nasha has observed temperament shifts in other reprints before. The point is not that there’s something wrong with number 18 specifically; they’re all Mickey, through and through. Nasha’s understanding of this matters—not from a plot perspective, but from a human, moral one.
So then you move on to what you’d naturally assume the next question would be: What is the reprinting process, or this repeated trauma to the human body through multiple deaths, doing to Mickey? And guess what? That’s not what the story is about either. It’s certainly a question you might ask as you’re watching, one that you’re meant to ponder. But it’s not the crux of the narrative.
Instead, that crux seems to be: What if there was a version of yourself who was actually willing to fight for you?
Because evangelist Kenneth Marshall and his perfectly-manicured, sauce-obsessed wife are monstrous people. (I have a long-winded aside to make about deliberately casting actors who are vocally, publicly opposed to the political alignments of a villain they play as a way of making it slightly more bearable for the audience; it’s particularly true for Ruffalo here, who transforms so entirely in this role clearly because he hates the man he’s playing, and knows exactly which real, living people to imitate for maximum impact.) There is no redeeming factor, no understandable neuroses, no tragic backstory to make sense of them. They want control over their subjects and unchecked ownership of everything they see. They are more worthy and, above all, superior to every life they encounter. And this includes the creepers, of course, the native life on the planet they’ve chosen to colonize. Life that should be exterminated at the earliest possible convenience to prove their holy might.
Don’t worry, though. This isn’t a story about that either.
It is a story about many things, but perhaps, ultimately, a story about getting the catharsis we are due. It’s about how we may think we’re alone while working against injustice—but also how it might feel to suddenly look across the room and find that countless voices were with us. It’s about feeling crushed under the weight of abhorrent, unfeeling titans—and getting one perfect chance to scream in their faces about their inadequacies. It’s about how the people who truly love us will defend and care for us through the most horrific experiences in our lives—up through and including our deaths. It’s about how we don’t think we’re important enough or strong enough or smart enough to deserve happiness—until there’s a version of us, somewhere (reprinted? locked away in our own minds?), who knows that we deserve far more than only that.
A lot of inhumane, unspeakable things happen in Mickey 17. A lot of beautiful things happen, too. I hope that many people head to the theater, make it through the awful things, and find a little of that catharsis at a time when it’s desperately needed.
