The Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho has delivered his first movie since the Oscar-winning Parasite six years ago, and it’s a great, big, slightly soft-edged, sci-fi fantasy. Adapted by Bong from Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7, it stars Robert Pattinson as a bio-clone menial worker of the future condemned to eternal life, or eternal death, by being repeatedly killed in the service of a space exploration corporation doing fatally dangerous jobs and then reincarnated.
It’s a broad-brush futurist satire on the theme of Elon Musk-type tech bros who say that whining about the environment is for libtards because we’re all shooting off for space really soon, where there have to be viable planets somewhere, and any current alien inhabitants are expendable – as indeed are the working humans who are getting us out to new worlds.
Mickey 17 is something in the style of his Snowpiercer (2013) or Okja (2017), and Bong’s “creature feature” reflex is an extravagant style that’s been enjoyable in the past. Mickey 17 is visually spectacular, with some very sharp, angular moments of pathos and horror – maybe inevitably, these come in the first act when the bizarrely shocking premise is established and before the story grinds more sympathetically into gear. But at two hours and 17 minutes, this is a baggy and sometimes loose film whose narrative tendons are a bit slack sometimes; the panto-villain turns from Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette sometimes make it look – not unpleasantly, in fact – like a kids’ TV special.
Pattinson plays Mickey Barnes, a hapless loser who owes money to terrifying loan sharks, along with his equally rackety business partner Timo (Steven Yeun). To escape these goons, Mickey and Timo sign on for a dangerous interplanetary expedition masterminded by a creepy populist-plutocrat with shiny teeth and slicked-back hair: Kenneth Marshall (Ruffalo) and his lady wife Ylfa (Collette); their presence reminds us of Bong’s apparent interest in Roald Dahl.
They blast off into space where poor, stupid Mickey agrees to be an “expendable”: he has to do all the suicidally dangerous jobs because when he dies, his body is just disposed of and a new one is bio-printed with all memories and personality reinstalled – something Mickey accepts with stoic humility. The crisis comes as the ship approaches a likely looking planet whose “creeper” inhabitants, like giant fanged insects, have to be exterminated; Mickey himself, on his 17th incarnation, falls in love with fellow crew member Nasha (Naomi Ackie), but things are complicated when Mickey fails to die as anticipated and must live alongside a new version – Mickey 18, a “duplicate” who is as ruthless and violent as Mickey 17 is gentle and kind.
It’s a strange story in its way, like a sci-fi horror in which all the horror, as well as all the cynicism and pessimism, has been removed. For all the bizarre violence and gross-out display, Mickey 17 has a kind of optimism operating against the fear, and we can feel the happy ending’s eventual arrival – although with this running time, it’s a long way off. There is, however, a weird moment when one of the creepy creatures appears to suck on a crew-member’s face – the visual echo of Ridley Scott’s Alien is a reminder of something leaner, meaner and darker.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the film is something on which Bong spends least time: the fact that Mickey knows something of which the rest of humanity is ignorant. The crew keep asking him: what is it like to die? Is it a feeling, an experience? Do you remember it afterwards? It has happened to him 16 times. Surely he knows the answer to this by now? Or is the eternally living, eternally dying Mickey as clueless on the subject as everyone else?
Pattinson’s saturnine look gives something mysterious to the role, but in years gone by Bong could just as well as have cast Tom Hanks and encouraged him to go into Forrest Gump mode. It’s eerie, startling – and yet also unexpectedly benign.
Mickey 17 is premiering at the Berlin film festival and opens in the UK on 18 April
