Korean director Bong Joon Ho finds his way to Hollywood for Mickey 17, a teeming, cockeyed adaptation of a novel by Edward Ashton. Ashton titled his novel Mickey7.
I don't know whether Bong has upped the ante by adding more Mickeys. I haven’t read Ashton’s book. I did, however, approach Mickey 17 with high hopes. Bong, after all, has directed some of my favorite movies. The list includes The Host (2006), Snowpiercer (2013), and Okja (2017). He also directed Parasite (2019), which won him best-picture and best director Oscars.
Given my expectations, I’d say Mickey 17 registers as a disappointment. Although the movie can be funny and audacious, its many tonal shifts (from serious sci-fi to blatant slapstick to broadly expressed satire) never cohere into a satisfying whole.
Bong again deals with class divisions and the human tendency to destroy anything regarded as alien, but Mickey 17 lacks the controlled brilliance with which Parasite vaulted over the top.
The casting features a variety of acting styles. A groggy- looking Robert Pattinson plays Mickey, a desperate young man who signs on for a space voyage to escape a vindictive loan shark on Earth.
Aboard the ship, Mickey becomes a human guinea pig, a so-called “Expendable.” He’s exposed to lethally extreme conditions so that the vessel’s scientists can develop vaccines to protect the crew when the ship concludes its four-and-a-half year journey to the distant planet of Niflheim, which evidently lacks an atmosphere conducive to human life.
Thanks to advances in cloning, Mickey's body is replicated after each of his deaths, but Mickey isn’t entirely obliterated. A memory storage brick allows the proliferating Mickeys to retain the same basic identity. Mickey remembers his many deaths.
As the story's dystopian future unfolds, Mickey 17 survives one of his dangerous forays, a situation that prompts the authorities — who think he has died — to print another Mickey. Also played by Pattinson, he's Mickey 18. Bold and crass, Mickey 18 —known as a “Multiple” -- begins to figure into an already crowded plot.
Two women enter Mickey’s life. Naomi Ackie plays Nasha, a security officer on the ship who falls for this schlub of an everyman. Anamaria Vartolomei portrays Kai, a woman rising in the ship’s rigid hierarchy.
Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo in a clownish hunk of exaggerated performing) presides over the ship with his devious wife Yilfa (Toni Collette). A former congressman, Marshall is followed by enthusiasts who wear red hats. (Draw your own conclusions.)
Steven Yeun plays Timo, the guy who got poor Mickey into the trouble that caused both of them to flee Earth. In space, the shrewd Timo fares better than Mickey. He becomes a pilot.
When the ship reaches the snowy planet of Niflheifm, the crew encounters Creepers, creatures that look like a cross between insects and armadillos. Fascistic and racist, Commander Marshall wants to kill the planet’s inhabitants and seize it for those humans he deems as genetically superior.
All of this builds toward an epic battle in which the two Mickeys try to save Zoko, a baby Creeper that has been kidnapped by Marshall. What worse crime could occur than threatening to drop a wiggling hunk of Creeper cuteness into a flaming shipboard incinerator?
A messy overreach of a movie, Mickey 17 may not satisfy sci-fi fans or those looking for satirical rigor. Thematically, Mickey 17 digs no deeper than the average Star Trek episode.
Sure, Bong’s darkly hued comic inclinations ensure that parts of the movie succeed and some of its images compel, but, for me, Mickey 17 emerged as an intermittently amusing smorgasbord of scenes rather than the masterful directorial performance I expected.
