Born to Die: Joon-ho Beguiles with Irreverent Sci-Fi Socio-Satire
After significant delays, Bong Joon-ho’s highly anticipated Mickey 17 at last arrives with all his signature verve and nuance intact. His first film since his 2019 Best Picture and Palme d’Or winning Parasite, this adaptation of Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey 7 seems a curious pivot on paper despite starring Robert Pattinson in dual roles playing a cloned version of himself as an experimental guinea pig on a newly colonized ice planet. What’s more surprising is the significant changes made to his adaptation, adding depth and dimension to a post-colonialist satire regarding the age-old ethical issues of human experimentation justified for survival of the species, not to mention some blatant reconfigurations of the novel (including additional iterations of poor Mickey). At nearly two-and-half-hours, it never feels like a chore to sit through, but some repetitive flourishes do tend to suggest some tweaking could sharpen the pace.
Circa 2050 AD, capitalism still plagues earthlings. Among them is Mickey Barnes (Pattinson), who is, for lack of a better word, a flop. After an ill-planned macaron shop co-owned with his best friend Timo (Steven Yeun) fails, they must pay back a murderous loan shark or risk being murdered to satisfy his thrills for filming torture. And they’ll be hunted down to the ends of the earth. And so, they decide to get off earth by applying to be part of a colonizing mission on a distant, uninhabited planet, Niflheim (which, in Norse mythology, is the name of the land of the dead). While Timo gets tapped as a pilot, the unskilled Mickey takes the only occupation he’s fit for which is an ‘expendable.’ In essence, his body and mind will be downloaded so he can be used as an experimental human and ‘re-printed’ after death. Not long after take-off, Mickey becomes romantically involved with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who works in law enforcement, but there are others who have become interested in him, such as Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei). After the four plus year journey to their new planet, it’s discovered there’s a potentially dangerous species of large insect-like creatures inhibiting their colonization, and the failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), who are the assigned leaders of this shake-and-bake community, plan on genocide. But after dying sixteen times previously, the seventeenth version of Mickey has become tired of the process, and while left to expire on an expedition into the tundra, a chance encounter with the creatures (nicknamed ‘creepers’) living there will change his trajectory. But upon returning to the ship after he’s thought dead, Mickey 18 has already been printed. Multiples are strictly prohibited, for several reasons, including a lack of food resources.
Pattinson seems to be enjoying himself as the dueling Mickeys, each given more distinctive personalities than in Ashton’s text. As the titular version, Pattinson adopts a wheedling, almost nebbish disposition as a push-over, almost veering into Woody Allen haplessness. His unexpected predecessor is much more abrasive and prone to violent outbursts, again a modification which enhances the build-up to a climactic showdown. But the real surprise is Naomi Ackie as Mickey’s territorial girlfriend Nasha who shares a strangely compelling chemistry with Pattinson while also vibrantly enhancing (and arguably stealing) all her scenes, including a fiery, passionate montage.
Mark Ruffalo, who appears to be continuing the over-the-top abrasiveness he adopted in Poor Things (2023), is giving his best Donald Trump impression as a sleazy doofus who appears to be a sitting puppet requiring his wife’s constant validation and direction. Ruffalo generates a lot of laughs alongside Toni Collette, who is a new addition penned by Joon-ho, playing a woman who seems modeled after one of the cheerful monsters one might see doling out hatespeak euphemisms on Fox News. Together, they are charged with leading this expedition by a church masquerading behind a company logo, and Joon-ho has a lot of fun skewering their false Christianity as a way to manipulate their masses. However, as fun as Ruffalo and Collette are, there’s no real room for them to back out of a caricature corner. Ylfa’s obsession is discovering new sauces for food, which she describes as ‘the litmus test of civilization,’ which includes a new recipe utilizing creeper tails, which appears to be the equivalent of shark fin soup.
Most similar in scope and tone to Joon-ho’s dystopic class nightmare in 2013’s Snowpiercer (read review), Mickey 17 is well-executed in its world-building, and is surprisingly charming, including its depiction of the indigenous species (initially given the degrading term ‘creepers’) who look like hairier versions of the Tremors sand worms. His 2017 creature feature fantasy Okja (read review) also comes to mind, using a similar template of unpleasant and often crazed supporting characters which sometimes feels excessive. And there’s an inescapable sense of arbitrariness by the final credits, resolving all its conflicts in this brave new world a bit too neatly, especially after guiding us through the survey course version of colonization tactics. But as a very well-produced sci-fi romance, Mickey 17 entertains as an arguably hopeful version of post-dystopic life.
Reviewed on February 15th at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival (75th edition) – Berlinale Special Gala. 137 mins.
★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
