Bong Joon Ho’s ‘Mickey 17’ – review
Robert Pattinson dazzles at the double in Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho’s wild trip into deep space
Director Bong Joon-ho’s post-Parasite return is a spectacular if uneven sci-fi romp offering two stellar Robert Pattinson performances for the price of one.
It’s 2054 when the eponymous Mickey (Pattinson) wakes up badly injured, stuck in a frozen crevice on far-off Planet Niflheim. As the eponymous numerical surname hints he’s already been ‘reprinted’ – the term the film and Edward Ashton’s source novel use for cloning – 16 times. A spaceship docks and untrustworthy pal Timo (Steven Yeun) appears – but leaves Mickey at the whims of the creepers, gross slug-like alien creatures ostensibly preparing to eat him.
A funny, mysterious and unusual opening, the sequence is characteristic of the remaining compelling but slightly overlong running time.
We learn in flashback that Mickey and Timo escaped from earth on a four-year journey to Niflheim having unwisely borrowed money from a dubious businessman with a habit of chainsawing his debtors. Mickey volunteers to become an expendable: an astronaut willing to die, memories intact and be reprinted forever more, with the lengthy journey passing sweetly for Mickey as he meets and falls in love with Nasha (an uber-cool Naomi Ackie).
On Niflheim, the colony run by failed senator Kenneth Marshall (a bizarre, gurning turn from Mark Ruffalo that’s even more oily than his character in Poor Things) and his similarly OTT wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) unspools into disarray after an extra Mickey is erroneously reprinted and the creepers mobilise outside in frightening numbers.
A big, strange spectacle that’s unlike most blockbuster cinema out there
Pattinson, so good as a sad-dad astronaut in Claire Denis’s High Life, is terrific in his dual role. His rough-and-ready 17 is a consistently amusing, likeable protagonist (shrewdly, Bong changed him from the novel’s highly educated chap to a regular working-class joe). One can see why Nasha is charmed by him. Pattinson’s 18, is smarter and less shambolic. Speaking of Nasha, the love story is believable but slows down proceedings for a touch of mid-film sag.
Darius Khondji’s cinematography is a vital element – he shot Bong’s oddball creature feature Okja and makes this piece just as visually striking: icy tundras, angry furnaces and fretting faces filling the screen in vivid fashion. Bong lovers will also note that the spaceship interiors are reminiscent of Snowpiercer’s train – and that is also a useful quality point of comparison in the Bong oeuvre.
Mickey 17 may lack some of the political bite of his previous work – though there are Trumpian elements in Marshall – but it’s unquestionably tremendous fun: a big, strange spectacle that’s unlike most blockbuster cinema out there.
Mickey 17 premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. In cinemas worldwide Mar 7.
