Bong Joon-ho's 'Mickey 17' Is a Bad Dot-Matrix Print Out

The trailers for Mickey 17 clearly communicate that it is an absurd and clever dark comedy. Having been bored and occasionally nauseated for well over two interminable hours, I’m not sure what exactly it was aiming for, but it certainly missed. It’s not as clever as it thinks it is. It’s less dark and more exhaustingly depressing than anything. And it certainly doesn’t succeed as a comedy.

The basic plot is that we’re tagging along on a space colony run by an incompetent pseudo-religious dictatorship in the person of Mark Ruffalo hamming it up as the Trump stand-in and Toni Collette as his equally insane sauce-obsessed wife. Robert Pattinson is Mickey, the one who is oh so fine he blows your mind, according to the trailer, and is an expendable, which means that anytime he dies, they print out a new version of him. An inhospitable colony world is reached, alien first contact is mishandled, extra Mickeys are printed, comedy and tragedy ensue.

On paper, all of this looks ripe for delicious dystopian sci-fi. It’s the kind of premise old-school Terry Gilliam would have made into a classic. Instead, Bong Joon-ho strikes out with a mess that wastes both the premise and some incredible acting with a script that manages to meander for nearly two and a half hours without ever exploring any of the concepts and ideas it teases.

Case in point: Pattinson does an amazing job with what he’s given. The titular Mickey 17 is played completely against Pattinson’s type, all wormy whining creaking voice grating weakness. He’s kind of adorable in his patheticness. This fantastic acting job is highlighted when the inevitable Mickey 18 shows up and is deliciously aggressive and psychotic with a growling flair that chews the scenery with violence. The two of them at odds is the only part of the movie that works.

Wow, you must think, it must be amazing when Pattinson plays even more Mickeys! It must be a fantastic meditation on nurture versus nature or some statement of how photocopying the body loses something ineffable such that the soul of each is distinct and different. Well, that would have been the cornerstone of a good movie. Unfortunately, those are the only two Mickeys we spend any time with because the first sixteen are disposed of in a quick montage of science experiment deaths. It’s not until Mickey 18 shows up throwing hands at everything that there’s even a hint that the different Mickeys are, you know, different.

The same two paragraphs can be written about essentially every other actor in the movie: Ruffalo is stomach-churning and captivating as a callous charismatic cult leader, Steven Yeun nails the slimy best friend who stabs you in the back all while making a buck, Naomi Ackie is incredible as the badass who stands up for Mickey and fucks up anyone who fucks with him, Colette manages to be an unholy hybrid of Tammy Faye, a wannabe Paula Deen, and a serial killer, and CGI manages to make some of the cutest weirdest aliens I’ve ever seen and want to cuddle. And none of it really matters or amounts to anything. None of the themes that could be highlighted by these performances are explored, because it’s always time to rush along to the next gross out, or atrocity, or cruelty.

Watching this movie reminded me of the stomach-turning of watching Don’t Look Up in that it shows a casually cruel and incurious group of assholes cut and pasted from reality and expects us to see it as a clever metaphor. It’s not. It’s just wallowing in a picture of a Trump regime running tyrannical over a small space colony. And it completes the picture by having any resistance be weak and inconsequential, steamrolled by the egos and assholes who don’t care what they crush. There’s rarely any kindness, even those who resist are just cruel in their own ways. Victory, such as it is, is accidental as much as anything else.

Movies don’t have to have happy endings, and I certainly don’t think a movie is flawed just because there are no clearly discernable white hats triumphing over the nefarious black hats. But one that is content to skip over ideas or contemplation of horror in order to just keep showing more of it, that’s not a critique of the grotesque, it’s just the cinematic version of freak show. It’s spectacle without meaning. And that’s not so fine, Mickey.