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***/**** starring Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo written and directed by Bong Joon Ho
by Walter Chaw Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 is a philosophical sequel to Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, expanding on that movie’s satire of an overly-militarized American Imperialist fascist state to talk about how we are at the mercy of trillionaire megalomaniacs who, because they’ve been social outcasts their entire lives, have interstellar plans for colonization tied to their specific visions of a master race. It’s another film that uses a civilization of alien bugs as a stand-in for a culture selected to be murdered, displaced, and exploited made by a foreign filmmaker who sees Americans as they are: so beguiled by money they’d trade their lives for a corporation’s. The people pushing us in Mickey 17′s direction will interpret it as a mandate, not a condemnation.
In the fashion of Bong’s films, Mickey 17 is, in other words, too smart to achieve what one hopes it might achieve. His kick is somehow too subtle for the proverbial dogs to howl. Remember when he stood on the Oscar stage and told America it was lazy, incurious, and illiterate, and everyone grinned like adorable Uncle Chang at the laundromat had just attempted a swear word? What I recall is his South Korean film winning multiple Oscars–including Best Picture–being viewed as some sort of watershed moment for Asian-Americans. Bong, it turns out, was understating the situation. It’s too late to turn the boat anyway, so we might as well be amused while the stupidest people currently on the planet flip the grading curve with the climate/disease/education/race/anti-gun-control murders of a few million people too intelligent, empathetic, and committed to the idealism of civilization to engage homicidally. Our elected opposition is so bought and neutered, it won’t even commit to calling weirdos “weirdos,” for fuck’s sake.
For all the Starship Troopers touchpoints, Mickey 17 is more Harry Harrison than Robert Heinlein. It’s less a hammer than a shiv. It lifts a few elements from Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell, the ninth novel in the Stainless Steel Rat series starring intergalactic super-criminal James diGriz (the titular Rat) as he plays “TikTok Man” to a parade of “Harlequins,” if you catch my drift. Harrison writes breezily, not self-seriously. His countercultural snark was a balm for me as a kid during my brief, halcyon days of hopeful rebellion. In … Goes to Hell, the Rat and his twin sons try to save his wife/their mother from the maniacal leader of the genocidal Temple of Eternal Truth cult, who has, along with working out wormholes, figured out a way to clone himself. Bong’s film takes on the same tone of insouciant-teen bird-flipping and builds a similarly mad, expansive, lawless universe populated with mindless stooges armed with misguided technologies and ruled by sociopathic dictators.
Like Harrison, again, Mickey 17 takes aim at the deadliness of fundamentalist religions–at how the ecstatic ache for the Apocalypse becomes mixed with obtuse hypocrisy and ignorance, resulting in the wholesale eradication of the impure. One of the villains in Mickey 17 wants to extinguish a species of sentient being because she thinks their tails, pureed, make good sauce for the reconstituted proteins she feeds her workforce. Mickey 17‘s alien threat is an intelligent civilization painted as a mindless infestation. They are defending themselves from invasion and annihilation, and they further express their humanity through their willingness to salt the proverbial earth in pursuit of justice for a single one of their children, abducted and murdered by these feckless interlopers. What Bong doesn’t satirize, possibly because it’s too outlandish for even this galloping farce, is how the only debate amongst the humans committing genocide is whether or not they should call it that. It’s not the Nazis that are the problem; you’d have better luck getting rid of cockroaches. The “good guys” are the problem. The good guys are the ones losing the chess game to a pigeon.
Mickey 17 is also heavily reminiscent of a Mikhail Bulgakov piece–a sci-fi The Master and Margarita where the Devil appears as a cheap sideshow attraction, raining false promises of wealth and its trappings on a morally backwards audience. It is vital but fatalistic, a warning about the coming of the Devil–but he’s already here and he’s been playing the game since before we knew the shape of the contest or the direness of the stakes. I guess it’s less warning than a marker, then, the pile of rocks Kit builds by the road next to where he surrenders to the police in Badlands. The contest is over, see. What’s done is done. Now is the time for the building of cairns. Bulgakov wrote one of the great novels while essentially under house arrest in Russia: a limbo in which a personal entreaty to Stalin kept him from arrest, but all of his works were censored and he was prevented from going anywhere. Did I forget to tell you that Mickey 17 is about a future where man has left Earth in search of habitable planets off-world? Hindering the chance to begin anew are alien viruses and fatal poisons in the manufacture of food and the purification of water.
One solution to the dangers of space exploration is cloning people using a giant 3-D printer. The spare meat? The spaceship’s recycled muck of biological waste, with a consciousness downloaded into a literal brick and then uploaded repeatedly into the worm-white golem that exudes from the printer. Because Bong has a sense of humor, when the new bodies come out of the machine they hitch and jerk on the catch-tray like paper does coming out of a printer when tasked to do both sides. Mickey (Robert Pattinson), a small-time crook running from a terrestrial loan shark, catches a ride on the planet-faring space ark of psychopathic weirdo (and failed politician) Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) as an “expendable,” i.e., a volunteer who signs away his consciousness and body for the discretionary use of the unhinged 1%. What this means for Mickey is he’s used as a medical test subject and an explorer of places where people are very likely going to die. Mickey dies, in agony, 16 times but remains amiable about his lot. This is the story of Mickey 17.
Mickey 17 falls into the lair of pill-bug-looking aliens, the native inhabitants of the planet Kenneth and his sauce-obsessed wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), would like to dub “Niflheim” (sounds like “Nippleheim”) and fill with the incompetent nincompoops volunteering to follow a person with no discernible leadership qualities to Mars–I mean, Nippleheim. Every iteration of Mickey is in love with security officer Nasha (Naomi Ackie), and every iteration harbours resentment towards his “friend,” Timo (Steven Yeun), whose bright idea to invest a lot of borrowed money into a chain of macaron stands ends in tears. Why Timo would think macarons could one day supersede “hamburgers” in popularity is inexplicable except as a jab at Americans whose appetite for “beef” is legendary. Eating is a running joke in Mickey 17, the focus on it as a trope a means of connecting the madness of equating status with food when food is plentiful with the practice of forcing enslaved peoples to farm spices. Life is cheap, cinnamon is expensive.
A funny thing for me to wish, but I wish Mickey 17 were more focused, especially in a soft middle section where things like Kenneth’s obsessive management of his followers’ calories and a promising subplot about a dangerous superdrug are largely abandoned in favour of a conflict between multiple Mickeys. Why does Nasha love Mickey? What does their affair say about the human spirit, and why doesn’t it say more? Timo is poised to become a central character, only to be reduced to a chess piece played when the plot stalls and the movie murders its own momentum. A surefire way to lose the idiots who need to hear the messages this film has for them specifically is to give them a chance to check the time.
Is there a hint of the Multiplicity cloning glitch where each subsequent copy is less developed than the one before? Mickey 18, printed when Mickey 17 was assumed devoured, lacks the congenial good nature of his predecessors. Why would he? What could have changed? Is the meat bad? Mickey 17 avows the meat is good, though I’d hardly trust his opinion. There’s a lengthy sequence involving a serial killer who clones himself to provide himself an alibi tucked in here to explain why “multiples” are banned that reminds of Bong’s older work (like, Barking Dogs Never Bite old) and maybe belongs in a different film, even its own film. Is the answer to the moral degradation of advanced generations of clone buried in this discursion? The last word on this subject is still Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow trilogy, and so far, everything following in its footsteps has suffered in the comparison. In a nutshell, Mickey 17 shares the strengths and notable weaknesses of Terry Gilliam’s dystopian, bloated-at-times vision of a corporate future, Brazil: a hearty measure of genius plagued by attention-addled, maximalist diversions. Mickey 17 has at least a dozen prominent literary and cinematic progenitors, and sometimes all those tributaries meet in an ocean wide and deep. And sometimes they lead to a quagmire.
It’s a lot to expect a project as unconventional as Mickey 17 to maintain the consistency of its surprises for two hours, but Bong has done it before with his giant mudskipper/American colonialism horror film The Host, his modern procedural masterpiece Memories of Murder, and, yes, his fêted Parasite, which makes a compelling case for eating the rich. It’s a lot to expect, but I expected it. Still, I wouldn’t trade Mickey 17 for a project less ambitious. It’s like the first two sequels to The Matrix, or a Megalopolis that works; a broadside that scores, a roundhouse that lands. You see it coming from a mile away and it brains you anyway. The “bugs” are the ones who value human life, get it? Being rich and Christian doesn’t make you a good person. It may in fact make you a conspicuously foul person. I have come to realize I prefer having too many ideas to too few. It’s true that one danger of writing about films for a living is that one begins to reward novelty and ambition for their own sake, but what of it? Mickey 17 is a science-fiction satire; why not make every swing a home-run swing? What a gift it is to be overwhelmed as opposed to finding oneself in the brutally stupid company of powerful Morlock cultists and their pathetic and bellicose entertainments. Watch this movie in a double feature with Oz Perkins’s The Monkey and fiddle hard, comrades. Fiddle like fuck.
