Director – Bong Joon Ho – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 134m
*****
Contracted to have his fleshly body reprinted, and his memory restored every time he dies, the expendable Mickey is assigned to a ship run by a right-wing power couple who plan to colonise a distant planet – science fiction adaptation is out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 7th
The snow has given way beneath his feet. Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) has plummeted through several layers of ice and now lies helpless on a subterranean ice shelf. His best friend Timo (Stephen Yuen) comes to rescue him. Sorry. To retrieve mickey’s his gun, but leave Mickey himself there to die. Because, after all, it’s easier to reboot Mickey and upload his memories. His friend can’t but help to ask, “Mickey, what’s it like? To die?”
Left alone in the planet’s underground ice caves, where he’s already seen a fellow crew member attacked by cow-sized, insect-mammals for which will later be named “creepers”, Mickey 17 expects to be digested alive by the alien life forms. Of course he does – that’s what happens in movies about alien life on other planets. However, the script has some surprises in store, and the creepers, who are set to play a much bigger role in the story, don’t so much play the role of unfriendly monster as that of the misunderstood race of indigenous outsiders in relation to invading, would-be colonisers.
Mickey is an ‘expendable’. His has already died / been killed 16 times. The current Mickey we are watching is Mickey 17. Flashback to his life on Earth when the original Mickey and his friend set up a niche food business, but misjudge the market and pretty quickly get into debt. This is unfortunate, since their money is borrowed from ruthless loan shark Darius Blank (Ian Hanmore), who takes great delight in hunting down and causing considerable pain to any client who defaults on their payments.
Desperate for a way out, Mickey signs up for a voyage to colonise the distant planet Niflheim, led by a loopy, elitist, right-wing couple. As he says in voice over – and there’s a lot of voiceover in the opening ten minutes – he probably should have looked more closely at the contract.
Anyway, now he’s an expendable. A person who consents to his memories being stored in a brick-size databank once a week, being put in potentially lethal situations and, if killed, being recreated by a 3D flesh printer. To show he’s serious, understands what he’s doing and has faith in the reliability of the technology, he is handed a gun by a corporate redhead (Holliday Grainger) and must shoot himself in the head to initiate the process. However, he doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation, even when he pulls the trigger: instead, he is overcome by and fixated on the smell of her hair.
Rebooted, on board a spaceship so vast that its population is to all intents and purposes a self-contained society as it heads for its designated planet, the known-as-the-only-expendable-on-board Mickey is mostly the object of general curiosity. However, Nasha (Naomi Acke) sees him differently, and soon they are a couple, busy trying out and drawing stick-figure pictograms of every sex position imaginable. (That might make the proceedings sound quasi-pornographic, but – implication, ideas and the audience’s imagination aside – there’s little explicit sexual imagery here. Indeed, one of the sex pictograms as its accompanying verbal legend will provide a crucial and wholly unexpected, non-sexual, plot lynchpin later on.)
Mickey, in his various numbers versions, is the go-to person for any life-threatening missions or tasks. He is sent out on to work on the side of the ship in jobs with zero chance of coming back alive, with his contact inside the ship asking him questions (“take your glove off to see what happens”) which will further their scientific knowledge. His hand is blown off by a piece of space debris. Later, he’s sent down to the surface of Niflheim to breath the air and check it’s safe. It isn’t, but his subsequent suffering and deaths enable the onboard scientists to develop an effective vaccine before anyone else – and subsequent versions of Mickey – embarks on to the planet’s surface.
All of which has considerable potential in various different directions: director Bong can’t resist exploring a number of equally interesting avenues one after the other. After working through the practicalities of being an expendable in the case of protagonist Mickey, he delves into the ethics of the concept, via flashbacks to political debates on earth and discussions about the rights of expendables which led to their creation being outlawed. Narcissist politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) gets in on the act during an ultimately failed election campaign whilst later, as the leader of the Niflheim colonising expedition, remaining hypocritical and pragmatic enough to see the value of having an expendable on board to do the life-threatening dirty work that no-one would ordinarily want to do. Marshall nevertheless vows to do away with any expendables of whom there is more than one alive at a given time, proclaiming such multiples as abominations.
After the bonding of Mickey and Nasha threatens to turn the narrative into a version of the Kama Sutra, the script ups the ante by having Mickey 17 return alive after being presumed dead, by which time she is physically communing with the newly printed Mickey 18. This very quickly turns into a polyamorous relationship involving her and the two Mickeys, then equally quickly shifts into romantic intrigue and potential psychosexual thriller territory as Kai Katz (Annamaria Vartolomei), recently bereaved of her own girlfriend, takes a shine to Mickey, thinks its unfair that Nasha has not one but two partners, and endeavours to procure one of the two Mickeys for herself. Alternately, Kai (or, for that matter, anyone else on board) could simply report the abomination of the two simultaneously living Mickeys and have them all killed.
Every time a version of Mickey dies, his remains are unceremoniously dumped down a vertical waste chute in the ship’s recycling / refuse area into a full melting pot below (the contents of which look like molten lava) to covert his flesh into raw waste suitable for feeding into and reconstitution in a new version via the flesh printer, tended to by a team of technicians headed up by the diminutive, bespectacled Dorothy (Patsy Ferran), a noticeable presence on the fringes of the narrative. She appears in sequences which would not be out of place in a medical or research scientist drama.
Elsewhere, fights to the death occur between one or another version of Mickey and his assorted adversaries near the chute, Mickey knows that if he plummets, he will simply be reconstituted, memories and all, while the others know that if they fall down there, that really will be the end of them. As the audience thrills to the action set pieces, questions about human mortality or immortality are never far away.
Curiously, after rapidly presenting successive Mickeys 1-17 as identical, Bong decides to differentiate 17 and 18 as two different personalities. Which undeniably makes for dramatic impact, but, given what has gone before, actually makes little sense.
Overall, it’s a restless piece, never happy to sit on one trajectory for long: just when you think you’ve worked out where it’s headed, it veers off somewhere else at least as compelling. About half-way through, leader Marshall and his culinary-sauce-obsessed partner Ylfa (Toni Collette) come more to the fore, as she wants to capture and dissect creepers to explore their potential usage in haute cuisine.
Yet the seemingly hostile creepers, whose presence at the centre of the story align this with the directors earlier creature-features, turn out to be closer in spirit to the benign, genetically engineered super-cow of Okja (2017) than the deadly, pollution-spawned, amphibious, predator fish of The Host (2006).
Much more scattershot in nature than director Bong’s previous outings, there’s nevertheless (if you pardon the obvious, possible creeper comparison) a lot of meat here to get your teeth into. The narrative may move around all over the place, but it constantly has more than enough going on to both hold your attention and make you ponder any number of larger questions as you watch. Given recent world events, the leader power couple, or at least the male, and the realising of his agenda in pursuit of his brave new world, which may or may not be a good thing, will draw inevitable comparisons with recent actions of certain narcissist world leaders (which probably aren’t entirely fair given the amount of time it takes between conception and writing at the start and the process of the movie’s production up to its completion).
However, as with Bong’s deservedly Oscar-winning, social climber family suspense thriller Parasite (2019), and his earlier science fiction epics Okja and, particularly, Snowpiercer (2013), there are most definitely themes here about rich and poor, elites and minions, and exploitation and environmentalism. Yet, anyone expecting another Parasite-style thriller will find their expectations dashed, even though Mickey 17 has director Bong’s sensibilities written all over it, and is expertly crafted on every level both in front of and behind the camera.
Still, Mickey 17 shares with Parasite and Snowpiercer (and, to a lesser extent, the more corporate-malfeasance-concerned Okja) a concern with the overall structure of society, or how the relatively few elite rich people treat (and, in most cases, take advantage of) the vast mass of poor people, a theme in cinema that can be traced back to Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927). It certainly represents Bong’s biggest scale production to date, and there’s no denying you can see the huge budget up there on the screen (or hear it on the sound system).
As his career has advanced both domestically in his native South Korea and internationally, it’s become increasingly obvious that Bong Joon Ho is something very special indeed. This new movie, even as it twists, turns, and in places confounds, is highly original and, in many ways, unlike anything he’s done before. An extraordinary piece of work, in the best sense.
Mickey 17 is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, March 7th.
Trailer: