Mickey 17 is Bong Joon-ho's crumpled film

The question that Mickey is constantly asked is: what does it feel like to die? In reality, the question Bong Joon-ho presents us with is another. Mickey 17, the Korean auteur's return to the big screen, does not aim to explain how and what one feels when dying, but rather how to manage to survive. Based on the novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, the film starring Robert Pattinson sees the protagonist classified as an Expendable, those who agree to die for the sake of science and discovery, only to be reprinted exactly as they were before, with their previous memories reimplanted directly into their brain. It was certainly not the existence Mickey had imagined, but to escape from loan sharks, one does what one must. And that is exactly what Bong Joon-ho's film does. Especially when, at a certain point, there end up being two Mickeys. Taking on the adaptation of the book, Bong Joon-ho deviates from Ashton's source material, as the author has completely entrusted the idea of seeing the core of his story transposed by a filmmaker and screenwriter he himself considers a genius. The director experiments with a story that is crooked and messy, just like its protagonist, thereby echoing the character and the absolute inadequacy of a figure interpreted with equal awkwardness by Robert Pattinson. This estranges the audience during the viewing of a deliberately absurd and grotesque work, where nothing is in its place, and precisely for this reason, it sparks curiosity.

While constantly changing its packaging but never abandoning the themes and references the author is attached to, Mickey 17 continues the blend of social critique and grand entertainment cinema that usually distinguishes the director's American productions. Not that the rest of his films do not pursue a constant analysis of class disparity and moral dilemmas, but it seems that the broader and more flexible framework of commercial cinema provides a freedom in which Bong Joon-ho can dare with the subject matter. Perhaps not by replicating the rigor of works like Parasite, where the theme becomes the pillar of the entire operation, but by finding a balance between commercial films and sharp reflections that can dare – and maybe even fail – within more unstructured narratives. This is why Mickey 17 has a long thread connecting it to Snowpiercer and Okja, the latter being its sibling also in terms of the sci-fi genre and, like them, more offbeat within the filmmaker’s filmography. It is an opening to a broader audience – albeit one that still demands sophistication – in which the director does not relinquish his worldview. Where common people end up rebelling against the abuses of a selfish, villainous, and greedy power, most often violent, and in Mickey 17 also quite stupid. A power that manipulates and poisons ethical and human issues, which the director himself questions and enjoys providing answers to that do not necessarily reassure the viewer, but rather engage them during the viewing and encourage them to form their own opinion.

Adding to the film’s social aspect, Bong Joon-ho advances an analysis of the media and the exposure of violence as the highest form of content. Cameras, lenses, and recording devices serve as the eyes through which the ship and the community of Mickey 17 observe and construct the narrative of their attempt to colonize a new planet – with moments touching on environmentalism and the treatment of species, once again paralleling Okja. The more extreme the event, the greater the need to capture it. To please the audience, to ensure it remains a part of history, to document and entrap. To unmask (or disguise) the rising totalitarianism, normalizing it through broadcasted images. The film’s references to the physical posture and public appearances of Mark Ruffalo’s political character are no coincidence, evoking figures such as Mussolini and Donald Trump. Through the film, the director and screenwriter ask us how much and what we are willing to film to achieve a result, how morbid our gaze has become, and how much effort it takes to stage an event. To narrate what happens and exploit it to our advantage. We are all actors in a greater performance, with a deference towards media and cameras that is neither identical nor as disruptive or fundamental to the film as in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, but which, in its own way, recalls it.

The colonization in Mickey 17 becomes a parody of human efforts and their descent into the ridiculous because, deep down, that is what we are. And Robert Pattinson certainly embodies this in a role as crumpled as the film itself; shrill voice and expressive elasticity cast him in a different light compared to his previous roles. Ironic, disheveled, unlucky. He is bizarre in just the right way and as imprecise as the film. A work that is a strange and valuable object precisely for this reason. An example of how we, as a collective, still have much to learn – perhaps by observing and filming those we consider "alien", who may turn out to be far more faithful, humane, and compassionate than us.