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Tripwire Reviews Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17
Clone Alone
Tripwire’s senior editor Andrew Colman reviews Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 out in cinemas from this Friday, 7 March…
Mickey 17
writer/ director: Bong Joon Ho
Stars: Robert Pattinson, Steven Yuen, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Michael Monroe
Writer / director Bong Joon-ho’s latest wacky sci-fi comedy drama is a breathless run through of gimmicky science fiction staples, and a whirlwind of absurd vignettes featuring the hapless title character (Robert Pattinson), who in desperation opts for the repetitious nightmare of being an “expendable” on a human colony / cargo ship, the Niflheim (which aptly means “world of the dead” in Norse mythology). Essentially Mickey’s job involves assignments that will lead to certain death, but he does get automatically “reprinted” (regenerated) each time he perishes. This predictably becomes a wee bit wearing for the former Mickey Barnes, but there is the saving grace of fellow spaceship inmate Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who bafflingly falls in love with him at first sight, and then proceeds to stay with our mawkish protagonist despite Mickey having seventeen iterations, not all of which are exactly the same.
The ship is controlled by two religious fanatics, the Marshalls (Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette) whose bizarre, cringeworthy outpourings belie their deeply sinister intentions. When Mickey 17 is thought to have died, the harder, less sensitive Mickey 18 takes his place, leading to confusion, acrimony and worse when his predecessor returns. Meanwhile the Niflheim lands on an inhabitable planet that is home to a race of creatures who look like a cross between H.R. Giger’s alien, an armadillo and a cute stuffed toy.
The film has gotten mostly positive if not gushing notices from critics – for the most part it’s a moderately entertaining movie, but there really isn’t any lift off beyond Joon-ho’s comically skewed vision of the future. Splicing straight drama, sledgehammer satire and zany comedy might be tantalizing fare for some, but it just betrays the desire for the producers to please everyone, which leads to a movie that, inconsistency aside, doesn’t add up to very much. The key themes of the movie (existentialism, identity, what constitutes a human being, circumnavigating death, the experience of death) are as old as sci-fi itself, and are sacrificed for lurid sight gags which just aren’t that funny. Maybe such concepts can no longer be taken seriously in cinema, although Duncan Jones’s Moon, from 2009, explored pretty much the same ideas to far superior effect, on a far lower budget. But then that was a straight gothic drama, which relied on atmospherics that forced the audience into the narrative.
We also learn little about Mickey’s backstory beyond a few dystopian notes at the beginning – we understand his motives, but nobody else’s, including love-interest Nasha, the only other fleshed-out character in the film. And the science itself (Mickey is reconstituted through the use of the ship’s waste matter and a brick containing all of his memories) is nonsense. Not sure if it’s meant to be that way, though. What is certain is that the antics of Ruffalo and Collette’s tawdry couple begin to dominate the show in the final reel, as they both careen head first into caricature, obsessing about power, intergalactic hegemony and sauces while guzzling the scenery. We know who they’re meant to be, so one wonders why Joon-ho felt the need to relentlessly beat us about the brain to get the message across. And the denouement, which I obviously won’t give away, is straight out of a Marvel flick.
This movie is by no means a complete dud, although Red Dwarf’s dowdy take on space age survivalism and isolation did it much better and that was decades ago. The cast are all game and the acting is certainly good, while there are some interesting concepts lurking within the hysteria. It’s just that we expect a great deal from Joon-ho, whose humour, perception and understanding of nuance might be on firmer ground on his home turf. In the end it’s a passable effort, but not much more.
Mickey 17 is in UK cinemas from tomorrow 7 March. Here’s the film’s trailer
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