Some films are predictable, dependable, safe; giving us easy answers to basic questions, adhering to well worn storytelling rules and wrapping everything up in a neat, tidy, easy to consume, bow. Mickey 17 is not one of these movies.
This really shouldn’t come as much of a shock as director Bong Joon-ho has made quite the glittering career of defying expectations. For example, his Oscar winning Parasite changed genres and tones more times during its runtime than I change my underwear in a week and the last time Joon-ho made a movie within the American studio system we got the eccentric, trainbound Marxist sci-fi thriller, Snowpiercer. Well, once again Bong is venturing into similar territory with his latest film, Mickey 17, a science fiction fable that, pound for pound, might actually be his strangest, irregular, most strange film yet – which is interesting as foreign director tend to get more conventional when they head to the States…
In the not too distant future, hapless shmuck Mickey Barnes and his conniving friend Timo opt to sign up for a colonising mission to the ice planet of Niflheim in order to escape a particularly sadistic loan shark, but the only way that the practically talentless Mickey can score a place on the trip is to mark himself down as an “Expendable”. What is an Expendable, I hear you ask – well, due to clone technology that has been banned on Earth, humans now have the ability to download and store your memories and then install them in a reprinted body when you die, which means you get all the juicy and fatal assignments that normal humans obviously wouldn’t survive. Thus we’re introduced to Mickey as he’s sent out to burn in cosmic radiation, test alien pathogens and basically undergo a whole bunch of suicide missions for the good (sort of) for the colony.
While it’s somewhat a shitty life that sees him ridiculed by the rest of the crew, Mickey still has managed to establish a relationship with a slightly unhinged security agent named Nasha. However, matters get made exponentially more complicated when, after surviving a near fatal accident that should have seen him get eaten alive by Creepers – the bug-like creatures native to the planet – he manages to slog back to the mothership to find that he’s already been copied. This proves to be worrying in a multitude of ways; first, the whole concept of “Multiples” is a massive moral grey area that got the practice outlawed in the first place and if both Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 are discovered, they’ll be destroyed by law. However, the second is due to a little snafu during the printing process, Mickey 18 has come out noticeably more agressive than the way more passive 17 and simply will not do as he is told.
However, as mounting tensions between Kenneth Marshall, the expedition’s vain and dangerously ignorant leader and the Creepers veer into dangerous territory, both Mickeys and Nasha soon find themselves thrust into a farcical situation that could alter the lives of every living thing on the planet.
So it goes without saying that Mickey 17 isn’t your usual sci-fi adventure as the director is fairly renowned for having a rather idiosyncratic style that means anyone expecting a more traditional film may find themselves fairly perplexed. All the usual Bong Joon-ho tropes are here, a gargantuan distain for the class divide and a tendency to lets its plot meander into territories that you don’t expect it to go, but I can’t help that feel that the advertising campaign (which plays up the offbeat, slapstick comedy) may mislead prospective audiences into thinking it’s more of a broader comedy than it actually is.
I’m only worried about this, because Mickey 17 is something of a weird blast that really deserves to find a large audience mostly because of how endearingly eccentric it really is. Think of the derranged satire of Paul Verhoven’s Starship Troopers and the hatred of authority that invokes Terry Gilliam and you’re part of the way there, but more than that, the film also throws in the type of surreal sense of Jean-Pierre Jeunet as Bong takes the story to some pretty absurdist places. However, while the director is an old hand at blending such dead serious themes as colonialism, fascism and capitalism gone nuts with such goofy moments as a drug addled Nasha trying to entise Mickey into a threesome with his accidental double (who is also worryingly into the idea), the movie wouldn’t work without the herculean efforts of Robert Patterson who is all in when it comes to doubling our fun in the titular role(s).
There’s been many instances of actors taking on dual roles to portray twins, clones and various types of doppelganger, but Patterson’s efforts as a walking, reedy-voiced doormat of a human being and his far more volatile copy rank as one of the best instances of an actor playing opposite themselves in recent memory. Starting of the film as a downtrodden nobody and suddenly finding himself somehow regarded by his crewmates as being somehow even lower on the social ladder thanks to his Expendable status, the actor isn’t afraid to come across as pathetic as humanly possible while everyone seems to want to take advantage of him. It’s a neat trick on the whole “immortal” concept that suggests that the ability to come back from any death would ultimately lead to you not unlocking the secrets to the self, but instead would have you be a hapless guinea pig for whatever anyone wanted to put you through. Also, Patterson puts across the idea that dying 16 times is enough to knock the self confidence out of anyone, but flips it when a slight mistake in his copy means that Mickey 18 is amusingly the ball of unrestrained rage that his predecessors have had beaten out of them after years of being poisoned, burned and vaporised.
Of course, Patterson isn’t the only one going all out to bring the weirder aspects of Bong’s trippy future to life. Naomi Ackie delivers another strong performance as a woman growing exceedingly tired of the bullshit she has to put up with, Steven Yuen is Mickey’s exceedingly punchable best friend who always seems to infuriatingly land in his feet, but most entertainingly of all, we get the double act of Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette as the tyrannical husband and wife team who have thrown the expedition together in the first place. While both are known for being able to chew the scenery on command, they seem to be trying to break some sort of overacting record as Collette’s terrifyingly vapid Ylfa believes that making good sauce is of paramount importance while her paving stone-toothed politician husband rapidly shifts from a delusional televangelist to full on dictator in record time. In something of a crowded character list, even the alien, insectoid Creepers manage to get actual personalities and plot arcs despite looking like strangely adorable woodlice and it all adds to the extraordinarily dense social world that this future delivers.
Some may be baffled at every single counterintuitive twist and turn that the film puts in place, but Bong Joon-ho never got his hands on an Oscar for playing things safe and while some of it admittedly doesn’t quite work and the occasional plot thread goes nowhere, Mickey 17 doubles down to be a relentlessly fascinating experience that has to be witnessed in glorious 32k.
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