Mickey 17

Bong Joon-ho, director of sharp, tonally complex films like the character-study procedural Memories of Murder, the farcical tragedy monster movie The Host, and the Hitchcockian thriller social satire Parasite, has made some pretty dumb movies in his day—like the sweet but silly environmental fable Okja and the pretentious yet feeble-minded sci-fi allegory Snowpiercer—but his latest offering is far worse than I had previously assumed any filmmaker of Bong's caliber capable of. Mickey 17, a dark-comedy sci-fi political satire, stars Robert Pattinson as Mickey Barnes, a broke everyman who signs up as an expendable crew member on a space mission to colonize a new planet. The mission's leader, a stupid politician named Kenneth Marshall (an insufferable Mark Ruffalo), uses Earth-banned cloning technology to make a new version of Mickey with restored memories every time the voluntary "Expendable" perish as the result of one of the many potentially lethal assignments he's given. During the intergalactic voyage, Mickey falls in love with a security agent named Nasha (Naomi Ackie). Once they reach their destination, Mickey's current clone (Mickey 17) gets attacked by the indigenous life forms of the new planet and presumed dead. But these beings don't kill him, and he makes his way back to the ship, only to discover that Micky 18 has taken his place.

Bong's movies have been major international successes not only because they're often tremendously entertaining but also because they're so easy to follow, regardless of the spoken language. His narratives move briskly from beat to beat in a linear, step-by-step way, almost as if the director is taking you by the hand and leading you through an adventure. If there's any backstory the viewer must know, he just shows it to you right before you need the information. This spoon-feeding works when we're simultaneously entranced by everything we're visually discovering about the world of the movie. However, none of this holds true in this generically imagined and rudimentarily rendered space picture. The first half hour of Mickey 17 is wall-to-wall expository voiceover narration from Pattinson, as he lays out how things are in the year 2054, how he came to be in his unique situation, his relationship with Nasha, etc. etc. It's some of the laziest writing I've experienced in quite a while, and it's the absolute worst way to tell a sci-fi story, especially one that's supposed to be about big ideas.

If you can imagine crossing the film version of Ender's Game with Adam McKay's Don't Look Up and then making it at least 5 times more stupid, that's Mickey 17. Each character has less dimension and depth than a Dixie Cup, yet Bong expects these thinly drawn individuals to carry the massive weight of his cumbersome, undeveloped themes on their shoulders. This picture has many ideas but no delivery system for them other than to have characters verbalize the lofty, thematic notions to each other or voice-overize the film's messages to the audience in the same way it explains the realities of its world. Even major narrative elements, like the fact that the different versions of Micky have distinct personalities (an unexpected and unexplained key plot point), don't get properly established; they're just casually mentioned in voiceover or some ludicrously stupid statement made by one of the characters.

Thus, the "comedy" that should help this painfully overlong mess of a movie play more smoothly becomes an anchor that causes it to drag all the more. Despite Pattinson's abilities, every attempt at humor crashes like a lead balloon. The scenes with Ruffalo and Toni Collette, playing the dumb leader's shallow, enabler wife, are all played as if these two are the funniest characters imaginable. But these types of one-dimensional bad-guy politicians are never funny because they're strawmen. An effective social satire requires credible antagonists to have any bite. If the filmmaker isn't interested in exploring how such meritless climbers get in, stay in, and wield their positions of power, he sabotages the whole point of his movie. And anyway, a political satire with the mindset of 2017 coming out in 2025 is not only pathetic, it feels downright irresponsible.

I have no idea if the source material for this picture, Edward Ashton's 2022 novel Mickey7, is as simplistically drawn as this movie, but I doubt it. Novels usually need to be pretty well-written to get noticed and garner acclaim. Sadly, this is not the case with auteurist cinema, where the worst piece of shit will be lauded and praised, or at least excused, simply because of who directed it. After sitting through Emilia Pérez, The Substance, and The Room Next Door last year, I'm continuously astounded by the arrogance of these auteur-minded writer/directors who insist upon writing their own adaptations and original scripts rather than collaborating with screenwriters who might be native speakers of the language they're working in. Especially when attempting satirical comedy, this need to do it all sabotages the solid, perceptive, and important ideas these filmmakers are trying to express.