Cue the singing teapots — Bong Joon Ho is the protagonist of a tale as old as time. Coming to a theater near you this Friday, this story is about a filmmaker’s descent from the highest highs of the awards season mountaintop and the ambitious mess he creates on the journey. The words “From the director of Parasite” carried a lot of cachet after it swept the Oscars in 2020 (with the COVID stay-at-home orders only helping to raise its profile in the months afterward thanks to all of that free time), and it was hard not to ignore: we had Parasite: The Graphic Novel illustrated with Bong’s storyboards, ill-advised South Korean tour routes through the Seoul neighborhoods in which the film was set, black-and-white editions of the movie put out on limited-edition Blu-rays, and, of course, an near-inevitable Westernized HBO adaptation that quickly descended into development hell. All of this was deserved – Parasite was one hell of a movie – but there’s always been two Bongs occupying the same headspace. The first makes near-immaculate thrillers (Parasite, Memories of Murder, Mother), and the second takes big, broad swings at genre fiction with diminishing returns (The Host, Snowpiercer, Okja). His latest, Mickey 17, is his first full-English language feature and, I’d argue, his first straight-up comedy. It’s thunderously anti-commercial, politically-charged, and unmistakably Bong, all accolades in my book. The problem is that it’s a really mediocre comedy that overstays its welcome and has placed a significant bet on whether or not you’ll like Mark Ruffalo’s Trump riff.
Mickey 17 shares some DNA with Duncan Jones’ Moon in that it’s all about clone chaos in outer space, but it differs in one key aspect: there’s no erased-memory subterfuge. Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) signed up for the cloning business knowing he will die quite a bit on his journey to Niflheim, an ice planet far from Earth and, hopefully, the loan sharks looking to chop him up into little pieces. His consciousness is preserved in a literal memory brick (a sight gag helpfully explained to all those who didn’t get it the first time) while, after each death, a hyper-advanced 3D printer replicates his body, recycled from materials stewing in a molten mixture of all the organic waste onboard the colonization ship. It’s a dangerous job, and nobody should have to do it, but Mickey’s stuck. If the chief science officers want to send him out into space while their ship passes by a sun to see what extreme radiation does to the human body, he has to go. If they want him to devote several lives to testing a vaccine for a viral outbreak onboard the ship, well, he’ll suffer in an isolation tank while his lungs fill with blood. He’s not just a second-class citizen here; he is, as the expedition’s leader dubbed him, an expendable. It’d be a fate worse than death had he not met Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a security officer, with whom he begins an adorable relationship. She cares for him fiercely in a way that no one but his long-dead mother had, and it makes all of the miserable journey worth it. Much like a Flintstone appliance, all that dying is, well, it’s a living.
The problem comes when the latest copy, Mickey 17, doesn’t die while on a mission in the planet’s icy caverns. He survives a fall into a cavernous pit and is left for dead by his “friend” Timo (Steven Yuen), the guy who got him into this intergalactic quagmire in the first place. He expects to be eaten by the “creepers” – the native inhabitants of Niflheim, who look like rollie-pollie tardigrades — that he’s been hunting and is astonished when they help him back to the surface. Once Mickey returns to the ship, he discovers that he’s already been reprinted, which is problematic for several reasons. First, duplicates are outlawed, both on the ship and at home (as explained in a funny little side-flashback, the tech was invented by a serial killer). Second, the penalty for duplication is permanent consciousness erasure, meaning he and his copy are fucked if they’re caught. Third, Mickey 18 (also Pattinson) is, at first glance, a Byronic psychopath, which Nasha finds hot. 18’s a man of action, and when he discovers 17’s still alive, he immediately tries to kill him. It’s only through sheer luck that 17 survives, but as the colony prepares to go to war with the Creepers, 18 starts having thoughts about murdering the buffoon leading them.
Our antagonist is Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a failed politician-turned-cult leader who volunteered to lead the expedition to try and create a genetically-perfect colony on a pure, white planet. He’s assisted by his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), who is obsessed, for some reason, with creating the perfect sauce (yes, you read that right, and I guess A1 got off the shelves long ago in the Mickey 17 universe). She is the brains behind Marshall’s botoxed face, but that doesn’t increase the pair’s IQ average much. Collette can only do so much to avert disaster but can’t improve their scenes together. To put it mildly, Ruffalo is rough as he pursues a flat-yet-whiny affect in search of a laugh. It’s Bush-era political satire repackaged for the modern age – remember when a writer could get a screeching op-ed published in USA Today for identifying that the Texas-accented moron in some film was a Slight Against the President? – only this time, no one’s going to care. It’s a comedy black hole, where humor is stretched thin to the point of annihilation. Bong took great care to say that Marshall wasn’t written as a caricature of a specific politician, but time (a scene in which Marshall gets grazed by a bullet plays very differently in 2025 than it would have in January 2024) and Ruffalo’s casting obliterated any ambiguity on the director’s part. Its relevance isn’t the issue – it’s just that it’s grating anytime he’s on screen, and I now understand what people meant when they complained about Jake Gyllenhaal in Okja.
Conversely, Pattinson is more than game to play every lob Bong serves him with his unique swing. 17 has a Brando-as-Moron cadence, and his narration, coupled with the on-screen pratfalls and panic, makes any time we’re left alone with Mickey and his thoughts exceptionally entertaining. He has a surprising gift for physical comedy – a highlight being the mid-film dinner scene in which Mickey discovers he was dosed with an experimental growth hormone, vomits up his dinner, nearly dies of anaphylaxis, and is then subsequently tortured when he’s injected with a pain-relieving serum that just makes things worse – and is brilliantly cartoonish when the moment calls for it. On the other hand, 18 is a riff on his Batman (with a little less nasal growling) and makes for a solid counterpart to the meek and skittish 17. There hasn’t been a twin pairing this solid since Armie Hammer in The Social Network, but I’m a little worried that folks will get turned off by how strange Pattinson’s choices are. They’re deliberately alienating, much like most of the roles he’s taken in the post-Twilight of his career, and that’s often a barrier that some audience members refuse to cross unless he’s strapped up in Kevlar or trying to wash off dye-pack stains in a Domino’s bathroom. Oh well, their loss. One undeniable fact is that every supporting character in his orbit – with specific mention to Yuen and Ackie – can play off of him in clever ways, and it really feels like they’re in an entirely different movie once they’ve chipped their way out of the Ruff.
As mentioned earlier, this is an ambitious film for Bong in several ways, but not aesthetically. His larger-budget trademarks are all here: the interiors of the spaceship and the exteriors on Niflheim are straight out of Snowpiercer, and our cute and cuddly Creepers are more like our hippo-pig friend Okja than the monster in The Host. There’s even a functionary in a goofy costume (this time, it’s a pigeon outfit, which is a nice touch of silliness), and, of course, Bong’s usage of on-screen cruelty to cute animals as a way of showing his antagonists’ depravity is, once again, a centerpiece. I hate this, even though it’s working as intended in the narrative, as I get anxious knowing that once I see a cute little critter in one of his films, there’s a decent chance I’ll see its guts. Your mileage may vary with this, but at least we can all be thankful he didn’t kill the dogs in Parasite. Yet there’s a flatness to Bong’s otherworldly adventures: his knowledge of urban landscapes is such an asset to the dynamism of his films, and it seems that once he departs the real world for a fantasy land, he defaults to the same imagery. It was novel in Snowpiercer, but there were fewer locations and more time spent luxuriating in the weirdness contained in those train cars. Here, it simply makes the point that this voyage is a folly done by a ship of fools.
His grander points about the evils of unfettered capitalism and the brutality of expansionist colonialism also suffer: as stated previously, he has done them better elsewhere. Bong makes dystopias with their eyes pointed towards better futures, and the didactic nature of his critiques exist on a spectrum, ranging from simple (Snowpiercer) to complex (Parasite). The problem is that I can’t imagine Bong making a big-budget film for Western audiences without wholly defaulting to caricature, which dilutes the impact of what he’s trying to impart to the audience and makes it feel like you’ve cracked open the opinion page of the Washington Post. Political cartoons are, for what it’s worth, unsparing in their brevity if not their criticism, and the back half of Mickey 17 plays like one expanded to feature-length. Shots of Ruffalo and Collette are practically captioned with “evil capitalist overlords,” while Yuen gets “class traitor” and Ackie gets “righteous proletariat.” This is the problem with political comedy – not simply satire, which doesn’t have to be funny – if the jokes aren’t there, the entire enterprise runs the risk of becoming tedious.
Mickey 17 feels like those greatest hits compilations they’d release in the ‘00s, a selection of songs the label knows or thinks will drive sales, and the only difference is that the one new single on it (represented by Pattinson in this metaphor) isn’t a colossal disappointment and is a banger. So, if you want Bong to shut up and play the hits, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed, but if you were hoping he’d use that Parasite moment to add to his legendary career, you’ll be frustrated that he seems to be running in place, albeit in front of a new audience.