‘Mickey 17’ Review: A Timely and Entertaining Anti-Capitalist Satire

On the middle of Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, an anti-capitalist satire that’s as well timed as it’s entertaining, is an “expendable” named Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson). He’s a disposable employee aboard a authorities spaceship lorded over by Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a failed politician and non secular wingnut looking for to flee the strictures of Earth and set up Niflheim, a genetically “pure” colony of devotees on a distant ice planet.

Tasked with doing essentially the most harmful jobs on the ship, Mickey expires regularly however is reprinted every time, assigned a brand new quantity, and re-uploaded with the outdated Mickey’s reminiscences, after which it’s again to being subjected to nasty experiments. However when Mickey 17 is prematurely presumed useless after being despatched on a mission to check creepers—the lifeforms inflicting hassle for the colonists of Niflheim—he comes nose to nose along with his substitute: Mickey 18.

Affably gangly in construction, Bong’s adaptation of Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey 17 is a deranged yarn that appears like a continuation of the fixations of Snowpiercer and Okja, whereas additionally functioning as a throwback of types to the director’s 2006 worldwide breakthrough, The Host. The distinct cinematic taste of his work, that dependable dramatizing of the awakening of sophistication consciousness however with a sure anime-inflected zaniness, is at its most beguiling right here.

That is thanks in no small half to Pattinson, who’s finely keyed to the weirdo vibes of the movie’s mayhem. He’s well-matched by Naomi Ackie as Mickey 17’s on-ship girlfriend, Nasha Barridge, who’s tickled to have two of him, however seeing as creating multiples of an expendable is trigger for everlasting decommission, the 2 Mickeys must watch out lest anybody else understand the error. As Mickey 17, Pattinson offers an infectiously charming hangdog efficiency, which is all of the extra obvious when he’s appearing reverse himself as the marginally psychopathic Mickey 18. The actor clearly relishes leaning into bug-eyed lunacy as a lot as he does pathos.

Although Mickey 17 can really feel like a mixtape of Bong’s biggest hits, it might really be his most refined and articulate anti-capitalistic critique so far. Because the self-styled overlord of Nilfheim, Ruffallo performs a fascist dingbat whose obsession with breeding much more repellent persona would appear over-the-top in the event that they weren’t so rooted within the realities of 2025.

Bong’s movie features as a metaphor not only for the methods wherein capitalism chews up and spits out the little man in its quest for exponential progress (our hero is an ideal employee whose labor might be extracted in digital perpetuity), but additionally how what we regularly name scientific progress has traditionally been made on the expense of the rights and well-being of society’s disenfranchised—or, nicely, expendables. However whereas Mickey 17 makes overtures towards exploring the authorized and moral ramification of Mickey as a non-individual particular person with out rights in addition to the darkish capabilities of the expertise that permits his digital immortality, there’s a way that it shrinks from the prospect to push the fabric so far as it feels prefer it desires to go.

Bong’s conservationist issues are important to his cinema, and the movie’s half-isopod, half-wooly mammoth creepers are important to furthering them. They’re additionally very a lot in his wheelhouse—without delay cartoony but practical sufficient to compel empathic environmentalist fervor amongst viewers. On the similar time, the creepers really feel like they pull focus from the extra compelling narrative and thematic prospects promised by the concept of multiples. The logical endpoint right here would appear to be an exploration of their revolutionary or damaging potential, however the movie stops wanting that promise. In the long run, we solely correctly meet Mickeys 17 and 18.

Nonetheless, this can be essentially the most amusing of Bong’s caustic satires so far. Although it’s as grim and pressing as Parasite and Okja, there’s a winsome, crowd-pleasing optimism right here that eases Mickey 17’s extra disturbing implications for humankind. It understands that laughing within the face of authoritarian populism is hopeful. Late within the movie, Bong teases a darker alternate future for Niflheim that seems to be a dream, as if to say that fascists at all times come again, but when a film about alien isopod tornadoes and clone threesomes can educate us something in any respect, it’s that what fascists concern most is being proven how ridiculous they’re above all else.