Mickey 17 Hours Long

Bong Joon Ho's latest sprays bullets at a plethora of satirical targets, but doesn't successfully hit any of them.

Let me just begin this review by saying that I believe Bong Joon Ho is an incredible filmmaker. I’ve been a huge fan of his work since The Host in 2006. And I applaud Warner Bros. for giving him $118 million to realize his vision, especially when that vision is not a sure thing commercially.

Having said that, the resulting film, Mickey 17, isn’t very good.

Very loosely adapted from Ashton Edward’s novel, Micky 7, Mickey 17 is set in the year 2054. It’s about a hapless schmuck, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), who finds himself in deep shit with a ruthless loan shark (Ian Hanmore) after his selfish, no-goodnik “friend,” Timo (Steven Yeun), convinces him to launch an ill-advised business. Desperate to get the hell out of Dodge, Mickey signs up to be an “expendable” for an outer space expedition to colonize a new planet, Niflheim (which is, as its name suggests, an inhospitable tundra), which is inhabited by an alien species dubbed “creepers.” As an expendable, Mickey’s job is effectively to be the canary in the coal mine and die as necessary for the (allegedly) greater good of the mission.

The sort-of silver lining is that every time Mickey perishes, the mission’s overlords make a new version of him, complete with all his memories, using the world’s most advanced 3D printer. It doesn’t make dying any less scary, painful, or generally awful, but, hey, it keeps Mickey fed and millions of miles away from the gangsters who want to mutilate him.

Problem is, unbeknownst to his employers - including a politician, Donald Trump… er, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), and Marshall’s Lady Macbeth-esque wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette) - the seventeenth iteration of Mickey, through happenstance, survives one of his assignments, and arrives back at his quarters one day to find the eighteenth iteration of Mickey ready to assume his life. For complicated reasons that don’t make a ton of sense, the law forbids the existence of so-called “multiples” - i.e., more than one living clone of an expendable. So now Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 are looking down the barrel of permanent execution: they’ll be killed, their memories will be deleted, and there will be no more Mickeys printed. Rough break for Mickey.

Mickey 17 has a myriad of issues.

For one thing, it’s not a story so much as it’s a message (or, really, a series of messages) parading as a story. And while it’s a message with which I largely agree, I didn’t need it repeated ad infinitum for 137 minutes. Mickey 17 is about class and caste, capitalism, religious fundamentalism, racism, misogyny, colonization, and animal rights… but it does not actually have anything illuminative to say about any of those topics. Assuming you’re not either a child or a recently-awoken coma patient, there is nothing you will learn about these subjects that you don’t already know. Its greatest insight is that the rich and powerful take advantage of the poor and powerless. Mickey 17 never amounts to much more than Bong saying “the right is bad” over again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

Still, if the film were at least entertaining, its surface-level non-revelations might be less of an issue. In his past work, Bong has demonstrated an incredible facility with tone, oscillating between humor and drama with a deft touch. But Mickey 17’s satirical targets are so broad and obvious that the humor rarely tickles, and the characters are so thinly drawn that the drama rarely tugs at the heartstrings. 

To wit: Mickey is carrying some guilt because he believes himself to be responsible for the death of his mother in an auto accident that occurred when he was a child… but so little time is spent on this story point, and whatever psychological issues it’s causing Mickey are so easily resolved, that it simply never amounts to much.

Ditto a love story between Mickey and a soldier, Nasha (Naomi Ackie): in the scene where the characters first meet, Bong makes the baffling decision to drown out their dialogue beneath Mickey’s voiceover narration, so we never understand why these two like each other. Their romance seems to boil down to a mutual enjoyment of sex, which is all well and good, but isn’t enough to get the viewer invested in their trials and travails.

And Timo’s redemptive arc? He never does anything to redeem himself!!! He’s a one-dimensional asshole, but his storyline ends in such a way that suggests we’re supposed to have warmed up to him. Spoiler alert: you will not warm up to him, because you will not be given a single goddamn reason to do so.

Mickey 17 also suffers from a jagged structure that further exacerbates all its problems. For much of the picture’s runtime, the story simply lacks momentum or meaning. Events don’t unfold in a “but/therefore” manner—they unfold in an “and then” manner. There are a plethora of scenes that don’t further the movie narratively or thematically, to say nothing of the fact that they simply don’t make any sense. 

Minor spoilers follow.

Take, for example, this series of events in the middle of the story:

• Mickey is invited to a steak dinner with Marshall and Ylfa - a rare honor for someone of his lowly status.

• The one-percenters have also invited another soldier, Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei), to tell her she’s exactly the kind of “pure” person they want to breed on their new planet. Why would they do this in front of Mickey? Fuck if I know.

• Mickey becomes sick, vomiting and soiling himself, because it turns out he was invited to dinner to test a new artificial meat. Why would they do this in front of Kai? Fuck if I know.

• Kai takes the sick Mickey back to her quarters and makes a pass at him. Why would she do this when he just regurgitated his dinner and shat himself minutes before and has not yet had a chance to shower? Fuck if I know.

• Mickey rejects Kai’s advances and returns to his own quarters, where he finds Nasha and Mickey 18. Nasha, upon realizing that there are two Mickeys, solicits a threesome. Why would she do this rather than worry about the fact that the Mickeys are now multiples in danger of permanent execution? Because she’s high.

• Kai walks in on the threesome and demands that Nasha share the Mickeys lest she report that they are multiples. Nasha refuses. Why? Because she loves Mickey. Why does she love Mickey? Fuck if I know.

• Simultaneously, Mickey 18 learns of the events of the dinner and decides that Marshall needs to be assassinated. Seeing that Marshall is in the middle of emceeing a live event, he grabs a gun and marches off to do just that. How does he think he’s gonna shoot the most powerful man on the ship in front of a huge crowd and get away with it? Fuck if I know.

• Mickey 17, Nasha, and Kai all follow Mickey 18 to the area where Marshall is unveiling a massive black diamond found on Niflheim. A pair of baby creepers crawl out of the black diamond, and chaos ensues.

• During the kerfuffle, Mickey 18 tries to shoot Marshall, but Nasha stops him. Why does she stop him? Fuck if I know.

• Nasha and the Mickeys are arrested for trying to kill Marshall, because of course they are.

If this doesn’t sound like a smooth, logical, and organic series of events to occur, that’s because it isn’t. The only narrative purpose for Kai and Mickey to be invited to the dinner together is to remind us that Marshall and Ylfa are terrible people, which we already know from the 18,000 other despicable things we’ve seen them do up until this point in the story. It’s dumb, and, frankly, condescending, and it’s all the more disappointing because we know Bong is capable of doing much better.

Minor spoilers end.

None of this, by the way, is even touching on the potentially-interesting ideas that Bong lets fall by the wayside (if they’re clones with identical memories, why are the Mickeys so different from one another?)… or, more troublingly, the fact that Bong undermines his liberal message with a less-than-stellar treatment of his female characters.

To reiterate: Nasha is a sketch more than she’s a three-dimensional human being, and Marshall, who is blatantly supposed to be Trump (his followers even wear red baseball caps brandishing his moronic slogan!), is largely the pawn of his manipulative, power-hungry wife (which is hardly the case with the real Trump). And Kai, whose defining character trait is that she’s a lesbian, still wants to shtup Mickey, even when Mickey reeks of feces. As for the creepers, it’s hard not to notice that their vaginal design.

It’s just not a great look for Bong.

Female issues aside: I’m speculating a bit here, but I think at least part of what went wrong here is that Bong simply chose too many conflicts to really hone in on any one with specificity. Mickey 17 could have been a tight narrative about class or colonization or capitalism or patriarchy or animal rights - in fact, Bong has already made many of those movies (see: Parasite, Snowpiercer, and Okja, all of which are wonderful) - but instead it’s a bloated mess that tries to be about all of those things. Given this deluge of quarry, Bong sprayed his bullets wildly all over the place, and wound up hitting nothing.