Director Bong Joon Ho, left, and Robert Pattinson on the set of Mickey 17.JONATHAN OLLEY/Warner Bros.
The last good thing to happen in the film industry went down on Feb. 9, 2020.
That was the evening when Parasite, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s blistering class-conscious thriller, shocked the world and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. A trenchant and sly satire wrapped in the guise of a bloody and tough-as-nails genre flick, Parasite marked a watershed moment for international cinema, becoming the first foreign-language film to take Hollywood’s highest honour. Overnight, the future of moviemaking – not just in Hollywood, but around the world – felt brighter and more exciting than in past years. But Bong barely had enough time to polish his statuettes when, just a few weeks later, COVID-19 shut the entire planet down, sending the film sector into a tailspin in which it has yet to fully recover.
So, is it too much to hope that this week’s release of the new sci-fi comedy Mickey 17, Bong’s first film in five years and his third in English, will mark the dawn of a brighter era for global cinema, and pick up from where the promise of Parasite left off?
“I mean, that’s so much pressure to put on this film, I don’t know if I can live up to that!” Bong says in an interview alongside his long-time translator Sharon Choi. “I just hope that people find it unique and fun. The past five years since Parasite, so much has happened. The pandemic, the rise of streaming, AI. I just hope that people see this film and feel that the power of cinema remains the same.”
The jury might be out on whether the industry as a whole is still a force to be reckoned with – despite an upbeat Oscars ceremony this past weekend, this year’s Academy Awards slate felt like the weakest lineup in years – but the delightfully chaotic Mickey 17 is proof that Bong is back with a vengeance.
A loose adaptation of Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, the film follows the outer-space misadventures of Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), a financially destitute ne’er-do-well who flees Earth to help colonize a frosty planet called Niflheim. The catch: In order to secure his long-haul passage, Mickey must sign up to become an “expendable” – essentially, a clone worker whose body is regenerated every time his assignment invariably ends in a violent death. But when the 17th iteration of Mickey is incorrectly assumed to be killed in action, the 18th Mickey must reckon with his past self, leading to all manner of interstellar existentialism.
Wildly expensive and thematically ambitious, Mickey 17 feels like Bong tossed the entirety of his filmography into a blender and then hungrily slurped the pulpy aftermath. It has the dystopic, trapped-in-a-tin-can atmosphere of Snowpiercer, the outré creature comedy of Okja, and the slippery social jabs of Parasite, all wrapped around a trio of genuinely bracing and unforgettable performances: Mark Ruffalo as a Trump-like messianic figure leading the colonization mission, Toni Collette as his maniacal wife, and a wily Pattinson as the many Mickeys, a character whom Bong felt a particular, if deeply dark, affinity toward. After all, every time that the director has made a movie, he felt as if he put so much of himself into the production that he died a little death of his own, only to be reborn the next go-round.
Mickey 17 follows the outer-space misadventures of Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), a financially destitute ne’er-do-well who flees Earth to help colonize a frosty planet called Niflheim.JONATHAN OLLEY/Warner Bros.
“I feel like I’m currently Bong 8,” the director says with a laugh. “When I look back on my life, I only think of it in periods of where I was in terms of a production. My life belongs to the films that I make. I don’t know how many more deaths I can go through before I actually die.”
While the director came out the other end of Mickey 17 still breathing, there were some close calls along the way. Mostly when it came to expectations and adjustments of working in the Hollywood system. While the director got a taste of the North American industry while making Snowpiercer in 2012 (it was acquired by The Weinstein Company midway through production) and in 2017 with Okja (one of Netflix’s first originally produced films), Mickey 17, made with Warner Bros. Discovery, marks his first major U.S. studio experience.
“In Korea, there is a relatively smaller number of people working in the industry, and it’s more like a family – we all move together, and share meals during the production. I remember when I first started working in the American industry, I first heard the terms ‘above the line’ and ‘below the line,’ which felt strange,” Bong says, referring to the film-budget terms for actors and department heads (“above”) and lower-ranked craftsmen and crew (“below”). “I didn’t get the most positive feeling out of it.”
Yet these are the compromises that Bong has had to make in order to secure the resources to deliver his increasingly expansive vision. As Mickey suffers through an increasingly macabre series of workplace accidents – his soul becoming a literal victim of capitalism along the way – the film grows larger in scope and ambition. There is the ruinous planet of Earth, the rusted hallways of the giant spacecraft (seemingly designed by the fine corporate citizens at Weyland-Yutani), and finally the snow-crusted planet of Niflheim, which is populated by a giant bug-like species whose digitally created hordes wouldn’t be out of place in Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. Such gigantic storytelling requires lots of cash, and that means occasionally having to leave Seoul for Hollywood.
“With Okja, we still had all the creature effects to handle, but the budget ended up being only $53-million. With Mickey, it was $118-million – when you look at the credits, you just see so many names!” Bong said. “But what matters is creating the atmosphere of having fun and being comfortable. With Mickey, all the actors, all the crew, they were so kind with each other. That’s what’s important to me.”
One compromise that Bong didn’t make: final cut. Despite rumours that Mickey 17 – which was originally set for release in the spring of 2024 – was being delayed due to studio meddling (something Bong is familiar with during his tussle with Harvey Weinstein over Snowpiercer), the director insists that final cut was always part of his deal this time around.
Still, just as Mickey’s experience inside the corporate machine leaves him flattened, Bong’s journey through the giant and grinding gears of Hollywood has the director looking homeward bound for his next project.
“Okja was the first film that I finished without memorizing the crew’s names – there were so many people that I felt anxious about that. Someone is working on my film and I don’t know their name! It made me feel bad as a director,” Bong says. “I’m not trying to be the king of memorized names. But I want to know everyone, and not just their title. So that’s more like the production I’d like to have from now on.”
Long live Bong 9, then.
Mickey 17 opens in theatres March 7.
