[Review] Hollow recursions of 'Mickey 17'

Korea Herald

18-02-2025

In attempting to clone his own success, Bong delivers a film that's more expendable than essential
Bong Joon Ho's first film in six years performs a curious act of self-replication. Like its protagonist, an endlessly reproducible space colonist, "Mickey 17" copies the director's familiar preoccupations while draining them of their animating force. The result is a $150 million big-budget exercise in diminishing returns.
The premise proclaims itself as quintessential Bong: Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), fleeing Earth's loan sharks, signs up as an "expendable" on a colonial mission to the ice planet Niflheim. His job is to die, repeatedly, while his consciousness gets downloaded into fresh-printed bodies. When Mickey 17 improbably survives a deadly fall, he confronts his replacement, Mickey 18, setting in motion a conflict between identical selves.
What's missing here isn't Bong's politics -- his career-long interrogation of power relations remains intact -- but rather the formal ingenuity that once made those politics sting. Where "Snowpiercer" weaponized its ingenious train-as-society metaphor and "Okja" delivered a visceral thrill in its chase, "Mickey 17" lets its questions float in midair. From ecological crisis to colonial exploitation, drug abuse to the myth of meritocracy, even Foucauldian biopolitics in its calorie-controlled spaceship, each theme arrives with perfunctory efficiency and departs without resonance; they are narrative checkpoints with functions, not implications.
Mark Ruffalo embodies this deficiency as Kenneth Marshall, a failed politician-turned- space colony commander. At a recent Seoul press conference, Bong praised the character's "unprecedented, cute charm" -- but it turns out he is neither cute nor charming. His performance, with its crass rhetoric and kitschy swagger, brazenly channels Trump by way of SNL while lacking the layered menace that made the wealthy family in "Parasite" so effectively unsettling. Toni Collette's Ylfa, the demagogue's vain, sauce-obsessed wife wielding excessive influence over her husband, resonates pointedly with Korean viewers with their own presidential politics, yet never transcends mere caricature.
The film's fatal flaw lies in the metabolism of its storytelling. Each plot point arrives drowning in lengthy exposition, delivered through Mickey's nasal, disengaged voiceover, that simultaneously over-explains its mechanics while under-exploring its implications. Likewise, the climactic mass uprising, complete with preachy antiauthoritarian speeches about human dignity, trades the director's characteristic narrative skills for manipulative didacticism.
It's a disappointing departure from Bong's characteristically organic narratives, where showing is usually prioritized over telling. When Mickey's narration waves away the controversy surrounding clone printing technology as "ethical fights and religious blah blah," it reads less as strategic evasion than narrative fatigue. Even Bong's trademark black humor has lost the tartness of his Korean-language works, suggesting something vital was lost in translation.
Retreating to blockbuster territory provides no salvation, as the film's attempts at spectacle feel recursive. Cinematographer Darius Khondji renders Niflheim in the same apocalyptic whites that blanketed "Snowpiercer," while the indigenous Creepers -- giant furry creatures with gaping maws -- feel like genetic splices of superpig Okja and, from a more distant yet obvious source, the formidable Ohmu from Hayao Miyazaki's "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind."
The irony is unavoidable: In his first film since ascending to the pinnacle of global cinema with "Parasite," Bong has produced something that mirrors its titular expendable protagonist -- going through the motions of death and rebirth while losing something essential in each reproduction. His message of resistance remains, but falters in its disruptive power. Like the endless Mickeys churned out by the ship's printer, this is Bong's cinema with its consciousness intact but its body reduced to mere meat matrix.
"Mickey 17" opens Feb. 28 in theaters in Korea.