Some of us are familiar with that oft-floating meme on social media asking grownups what they would say if they met their younger selves. I'd wager a brief episode of introspection would surely follow. What would we really say to our younger selves — or, to be more specific, former, selves?
There's an instance in Mickey 17 where — and this has already been revealed in the trailers — one 'reprint' of Mickey Barnes meets another.
This is usually not supposed to happen because, in all the previous instances, when a new clone of Mickey is created, the former has already perished in one painful manner or another. It's what happens to you when you have signed up to be an 'expendable' — being required to die over and over again is, in Mickey's case, an occupational hazard. Simply put, it is a... hazardous occupation.
So, in the aforementioned situation, the new version, 'Mickey 18' reprimands 'Mickey 17' for not standing up to Mark Ruffalo's character, Kenneth Marshall, the autocratic politician-cum-head honcho of the space colonisation project he is a part of. Ruffalo seems to have had so much fun in the role; it's a delight to see him play another eccentric scumbag after Poor Things.
It's an unexpected act of benevolence from a certain force, earlier presumed dangerous, that kicks off the film — and, later, a soul-rewiring process. By this point, stored in our minds is the information that no matter how many new iterations of Mickey are churned out, with seemingly as much ease as making popcorn, the memories of his past versions — beginning with 'Mickey 1' — have been preserved carefully and uploaded into the newer ones.
When we get to 'Mickey 18', he seems like a different, more evolved, more daring version of 'Mickey 17', and one immediately remembers that meme. 'Mickey 18' is like an upgraded operating system. He is the guy inspiring a softie to turn rebellious. He is the guy 'your girlfriend told you not to worry about' who ends up doing everything you worried about. What makes it weirder, of course, is that this guy is... you. There is a strange pre-interval situation that's essentially a wicked version of a threesome intercut with another strange situation involving a possibly bisexual woman.
Director Bong Joon-ho would probably have laughed out loud at this situation — he is throwing it at us to make us wonder whether we would've entertained such a fantasy or whether our moral scruples would hold us back. There are a few other stimulating ideas that are not necessarily funny.
Speaking of funny, Joon-ho is a filmmaker who has often demonstrated his knack for incorporating exceptional dark humour into even some of his most chilling stories, notably Memories of Murder and Parasite. The same goes for his creature feature The Host, which blended sharp satire with suspense-driven spectacle.
Unfortunately, Mickey 17 proves that Joon-ho's signature brand of comedy works better in his Korean-language films than in his Hollywood ventures. At least in Snowpiercer, humour wasn't a problem because the elements of the survival thriller dominated more — in a dystopian environment similar to the one in Mickey 17 — than a film that wants to do two things simultaneously and accomplishes neither. Okja had this problem, too, in some places. However, it compensated for its shortcomings with its stirringly poignant moments.
One of the jarring qualities of Mickey 17 is its tonal inconsistency and the randomness with which some characters behave. It also tends to get stuck, at times, in disappointingly lacklustre interactions that hamper the narrative pace. Robert Pattinson is safe from this, and to his credit, he makes us deeply feel the journey of a man who is exhausted after going through the die-reprint-die routine 16 times.
You can come up with a possible explanation for why his character would do something. Pattinson imbues his performance with the right balance of goofiness, clumsiness, and the understandable submission of someone who opted for an immensely draining job to escape the pitfalls of a miserable, debt-ridden life on earth.
Though it's not exactly what Groundhog Day or Edge of Tomorrow territory, the situation where Mickey repeatedly becomes a guinea pig to aid the development of an antivirus recalls those films. Those who have seen Joon-ho's Okja will also notice a few visual and thematic commonalities.
Yes, we can throw in words like 'anti-capitalism' (or anti-Trumpism), 'class differences', 'dystopian' or whatever to describe the film, but what's the point when it isn't effective as a work of entertainment? That matters. Besides, Trump won! Perhaps Mickey 17 would've stirred something in us if he hadn't.
Film: Mickey 17
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Steven Yeun
Rating: 2.5/5
