The last time someone groped Robert Pattinson aboard a spaceship, to the best of my knowledge, was in Claire Denis’s 2018 movie, “High Life.” The groper was a lowlife—a deranged doctor, bent on harvesting astronaut semen for pernicious procreative ends. Pattinson’s character, a self-declared celibate, was unconscious and unconsenting. The assault took place on the grottiest of vessels, manned by violent criminals who had been banished into deep space. The movie was a hell of a dark trip, but Pattinson, among the most consistently adventurous actors of his generation, kept you tethered to the story with an almost gravitational force. His unswerving conviction powered the film’s own.
“High Life” might one day make a nifty, nasty double bill with the loopy futuristic farce “Mickey 17,” the new film from the South Korean director and screenwriter Bong Joon-ho. Here is another gloomy spaceship, abounding in grim experiments and hostile personalities, with Pattinson once more playing a reluctant space traveller. Correction: he plays at least seventeen reluctant space travellers, all of whom are named Mickey Barnes, and none of whom are unduly bothered about celibacy. When one Mickey is playfully fondled by his girlfriend, Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a shock of ribald energy courses through the movie. He’s in capable hands, and so, in another sense, are we. In the often sterile cosmos of the Hollywood space opera, the mere acknowledgment of human horniness is a sign of intelligent life.
Elsewhere, alas, Mickey has little bodily autonomy. He is an Expendable, by which I do not mean a fist-bumping associate of Sylvester Stallone but, rather, a human guinea pig, contractually obligated to die and live again (and again and again) through the dubious miracle of human-printing technology. The deaths are at once spasmodically grisly—there will be bloody vomit—and agonizingly protracted. A team of scientists watch, with more interest than concern, as the Mickeys are exposed to skin-burning radiation, lung-melting viruses, and lethal nerve gas. Down into an incinerator, or “cycler,” tumbles Mickey’s fresh corpse; out of a printer rolls a living, breathing Mickey, reconstituted from chunks of organic waste and ready to be implanted with an up-to-date memory bank. Such is the peril of donating one’s bodies to science.
The outlandish premise comes straight from Edward Ashton’s 2022 science-fiction novel, “Mickey7,” but it’s typical of Bong, a merry maximalist, that he has added ten dead Mickeys to the title. The seventeenth Mickey is the one we encounter at the start, and he quickly catches us up to speed. It’s the year 2054, and we are on a snowbound planet called Niflheim, more than four years’ journey from Earth. The spaceship is now a compound, the home of a new human colony, and Mickey is its first line of defense. He joined the voyage as an Expendable out of desperation, hoping to escape a murderous loan shark back on Earth and figuring that multiple reversible deaths would be preferable to a single permanent one. He figured wrong.
“I really hate dying,” Mickey tells us, and something in the jaundiced but friendly rasp in his voice—he’s part film-noir gumshoe, part good-natured goofball—immediately gets you on his side. Pattinson, looking shabbier than any actor between stints as Bruce Wayne should, sports a dopey grin and an even dopier haircut, which he sometimes tucks under a floppy-eared aviator hat. Mickey is racked with guilt over a fateful childhood mistake, and so his purgatorial existence, in which he is denied the pleasures of life and the closure of death, becomes a demented search for grace. He’s a fuckup, but endearingly so; there’s real pathos in his paroxysms of self-pity. In an early scene, he is set upon by a shrieking, skittering swarm of creepers—imagine giant, whitish pill bugs with huge mandibles—and expects to be devoured (and resurrected) within seconds. When the creepers instead set Mickey free, without so much as a nibble, he wonders if his poor flesh has been recycled once too often. The relief of survival cannot quite dispel the sting of rejection, and he cries out in protest, “I’m still good meat!”
Faithful Bong-heads will hear those words and recall the filmmaker’s 2017 thriller, “Okja,” about a young girl and a gargantuan genetically modified pig she rescues from an abattoir. The movie was by turns deadly serious and gaudily out-there—a familiar Bong formulation—and its glimpse into the bowels of industrialized meat production was horrific enough, I suspect, to put some off bacon for life. It nearly made a vegetarian out of Bong himself, whose animal-rights advocacy has, if anything, grown only more pronounced; the creepers of Niflheim, though hardly as cute as Okja, are about as cuddly as a bunch of computer-generated isopods could be. Count the number of times you find yourself murmuring “aww” instead of “yuck,” and you will have a new appreciation of Bong’s mastery of visual-effects technologies. You emerge from “Mickey 17” reminded that the real terrors walk among us, on two legs and with nary a mandible in sight.
With the exception of the loving, loyal Nasha, whom Ackie invests with romantic ardor and action-hero intensity, Mickey’s fellow-travellers prove a rotten lot. His so-called best friend, Timo (a wily Steven Yeun), is an opportunist who relentlessly exploits and mistreats Mickey. Infinitely worse is Kenneth Marshall, the leader of the expedition and the wannabe conqueror of Niflheim. He’s played by Mark Ruffalo, who, perhaps still high on the comic fumes of “Poor Things,” goes full fascist here, merging Musky delusions with Trumpian mannerisms—he’s all sneers, jeers, and garish veneers. Marshall’s wife, Ylfa (a diabolically chirpy Toni Collette), is also a nasty piece of work; she spends her days whipping up sinister sauces of unknown provenance, like a Food Network Lady Macbeth.
Marshall, we’re told, is a failed politician, a two-time election loser who commands an army of cultish supporters in red hats. He preaches a foul doctrine of interplanetary manifest destiny, full of warmongering rhetoric and freak-show hymns about “the Promised Land.” Bong clearly has America in his satirical sights—but which America? An alternate-universe one that rejected Trumpism, and where “Mickey 17” might have landed with a sigh of relief? (The movie wrapped in January, 2023.) Or the constitutional dystopia in which we are now caught, beside which even the ugliest onscreen villainy pales into insignificance? Either way, the Marshalls, over-the-top fun for a while, soon veer into uncharted realms of ham-fisted cartoonery. Ruffalo and Collette can be actors of exacting subtlety, but only, apparently, in a solar system that “Mickey 17” leaves firmly behind.
A spirit of political provocation has long pervaded Bong’s work, certainly as far back as “The Host” (2006), an exhilarating monster movie that, amid giddy bursts of Seoul-shaking mayhem, jabbed furiously at environmental decay and governmental negligence. His most recent and resonant success, the Oscar-winning “Parasite” (2019), was a family tragedy so intricately drawn that you couldn’t tell where the heist machinations ended and the economic-inequality subtexts began. In between those movies, which were filmed in Korea, came two impressive but unwieldy adventures, both of which were mostly in English and embraced their causes with a distinctly un-Hollywood forthrightness. The post-apocalyptic railway thriller “Snowpiercer” (2013) fused class revolt and climate change; “Okja” blasted away at the greed of corporations and carnivores alike.
“Mickey 17” picks up where these films left off, to the point of sometimes seeming like its own batch of recycled goods. As in “Snowpiercer,” the characters are trapped in a world of ice, forced to subsist on bland, gelatinous rations, and desperate for a hit of an illegal substance. (The pull of addiction is a sly, understated constant in Bong’s cinematic universe.) And, as in “Okja,” an elaborate genetic experiment, designed for the ostensible benefit of humanity, is exposed as grossly inhumane. In all three movies, Bong’s skills as an action filmmaker are marvellously evident: even a fairly simple sequence involving a cell phone and a chainsaw snaps together with virtuoso precision. But there is also something in the shift to a broader big-budget canvas that persistently defeats him. His meticulous craftsmanship takes on narrative bloat, his fluid juggling of characters and subplots turns mechanistic, and his customarily perfect pitch with actors gets lost, or at least scrambled, in translation.
Pattinson deftly dodges this latter trap, and he doesn’t just save the film but deepens it. There’s a neat trick to his performance that I won’t divulge; suffice to say that the movie slips us a Mickey we didn’t expect, a Mickey who isn’t a genial pushover. Pattinson, a putty-limbed stooge one minute and a vicious nihilist the next, has fun challenging Mickey’s preconceptions of himself—or, rather, himselves. Even if DNA and memories could be duplicated at will, Bong suggests, individual morality would remain a glorious uncertainty principle, too human and singular to be nailed down. There’s a strange comfort in that idea, and in the movie’s sweetly hopeful finale. Mickey, at long last, gets the end he deserves. ♦
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