As Hollywood studios swiftly kowtow to the Republican regime, there’s a worry that Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s stark yet oddly life-affirming anti-capitalist sci-fi, will be one of the last honest pieces of art to slip under the gates. If that turns out to be true, we should treasure it all the more. The Korean auteur, off the back of his 2020 Best Picture win for Parasite, has taken $80m (£63m) of Warner Bros’s money and, four release date changes aside, secured final cut on a giddy genre epic that answers the existential query at the very heart of our current existence: what’s the point of living in a world built to make us feel worthless?
Here, the idea of an “expendable”, in a story adapted by Bong from Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, is the literalised idea of the capitalist worker: in order to escape his debtors, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) signs up to be an “expendable” on a colony mission to the planet Niflheim. When he dies, his body is simply reprinted – in the grotesque, shuddering manner of an inkjet – and uploaded with his memories so that he can work and die again. By the time we meet him, we’ve reached Mickey 17, 10 Mickeys deeper than in Ashton’s book.
For those whose only familiarity with Bong’s work comes from Parasite, Mickey 17 is different but tonally in check – tender, cynical, violent, humanist, absurdist, rooted in class politics. Yet it’s more of a direct continuation of some of his earlier films, fusing the futuristic utilitarian environments of Snowpiercer (2013) with the cuddly animal rights mascot of Okja (2017). Said creatures, here, are the insectoid “creepers”, the indigenous population of Niflheim. They’re large, hairy grubs with squishy stomachs that look like packs of bread rolls.
Mickey 17 first encounters them after he tumbles into an ice ravine. “Oh great, why not?” he sighs. Can they at least swallow him whole? And not chew him bite by bite? This is Pattinson at his best, holding his movie star charisma hostage in order to pursue loveable weirdos in all kinds of shades (see: Benny and Josh Safdie’s Good Time or Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse). He’s fully liberated here, consistently finding the most unexpected and delightful ways to deliver a line, with an American accent that’s the auditory equivalent of pushing up a pair of spectacles. After staggering his way back to the colony ship, Mickey 17 is confronted with Mickey 18. He’s now a double. He’s been succeeded. If he dies, that’s it.
One of the funniest jokes (though also extremely sad, if you pause to think about it) is his character’s repeated resignation in the face of death. When a colleague reveals he’s been sent out on a spacewalk to test the effects of radiation? “Oh, OK.” When they realise he’s still alive when they’re about to toss him into the furnace, only to shrug and proceed anyway? “Thank you.” When the “creepers”, without explanation, choose not to eat him? “I’m still good meat!” Mickey is a hero for every person beaten down to the point they no longer live but merely exist.
Mickey 17 is a sci-fi of the working class, of service corridors by production designer Fiona Crombie and matching jumpsuits by costume designer Catherine George. It’s essentially Bong’s take on Alien (1979) – a comedy about how Weyland-Yutani treats people as fodder, only the xenomorph is far friendlier and interested in community solidarity. All those at the top of the food chain are howlingly awful yet, unfortunately for us, plausible. Mark Ruffalo features as former congressman Kenneth Marshall, with his tan, veneers and vulnerability to exploitation by the religious right – yes, he’s obviously Trump, but Ruffalo lends him enough peculiarities that he works both as a satire and a diabolical creation in his own right. The same can be said of Toni Collette’s sauce-obsessed Ylfa, Marshall’s wife.
Darius Khondji’s clever and dynamic cinematography drags us right into the dirt with these characters. It bonds us to them, including the closest thing the film has to a voice of hope, and a beautifully f-bomb-loaded one at that – Mickey’s girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie, boasting a winning grin). For all the cruelty and buffoonery that might surround his hero, Bong lets us in on a revelation: what we’re really watching is a man learning that it’s OK for him to be happy.
Dir: Bong Joon-ho. Starring: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo. 15, 137 minutes.
‘Mickey 17’ is in cinemas from 7 March
