Mickey 17

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What’s the story: Fleeing a vicious loan shark on Earth, Mickey Barnes (Pattinson) signs up to become a human lab rat on a deep space expedition, led by ex-politician turned quasi-cult leader Kenneth Marshall (Ruffalo). Being thrown into the most dangerous missions, Mickey finds himself dying and being re-cloned to do it all over again. But, with all this dying, might Mickey find something worth living for?

What’s the verdict: Being a Bong Joon-ho-head, it is bitter indeed to report his latest movie is a disappointment. Certainly, there are moments that dazzle, and maybe it is wrong of me to now take the director’s brilliance for granted. But said moments twinkle like a star whose light and warmth died long ago. The uneasiness from that oft-shifted back release date was justified.

What begins as an existential rumination on the nature of being soon sinks into a weirdly stale porridge churned from the director’s previous movies. There’s Snowpiercer with the rigidly classist and fundamentalist society aboard the deep space craft; Mark Ruffalo’s messianic barnpot Marshall a weak imitation of Mr. Wilford from Bong’s earlier, superior sci-fi chiller.

Then there’s Okja, with a meat-is-murder subplot around Marshall’s wife – the fittingly hammy Toni Collette – obsessed with dining on the indigenous lifeforms of a distant planet these explorers wind up calling home. With evil scientists throwing ethical concerns out the airlock as they subject Mickey to alien pathogens and oceans of radiation, we see trace elements of The Host. And all this must make room for a large slab of bug-business bizarrely lifted wholesale from Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers.

Like his Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson has used his franchise fortune to take on more interesting projects. Here he gamely sheds his heartthrob charisma to become a good-natured interplanetary imbecile, plus a slightly more clued-up “upgrade.” Pattinson fans will be happy at all the Bobbing onscreen, and the film’s pleasures are largely derived from his guileless dolt trying to smile through whatever the universe is (literally) throwing at him.

But, you feel a twinge of sympathy for the actor: he worked with Christopher Nolan on Tenet, a film that drearily rehashed that director’s former glories, and something similar is happening here. He should also avoid travelling to the stars – remember 2018’s High Life? Understandable if you don’t.

Good support arrives courtesy of Blink Twice’s Naomi Ackie as Mickey’s fiery love interest, and an underused Steven Yeun as Mickey’s shifty mate Timo. Mark Ruffalo, attempting to recreate his hilarious buffoon from Poor Things, fumbles for laughs gurning his way through an underwritten role. Welcome faces fill out minor roles – Holliday Grainger, Penny Farris, Thomas Turgoose, Tim Key, the late Haydn Gwynne – and make an impression despite the material rather than because of it.

But the wayward story never gels, and the film’s anti-capitalist, anti-tech bro message is lost amidst myriad plot threads and unfocussed storytelling, making the whole thing airless (pun intended).

A major flaw is that Mickey 17 bravely (foolishly?) gambled on Trump losing last November. Ruffalo’s clownish, vainglorious politician is a thinly disguised analog for the Russian Agent Orange, here blasted into space with his self-serving sycophants after botching an election. Ham-fisted speeches about Marshall’s corrosive effect on society were presumably intended for an audience living in a far better timeline than this one.

The pressure of following Parasite’s success does not appear to be a root issue for why Mickey 17 stumbles. The film’s scale is confidently handled, even if incidental details teeming in the background are more engaging than what’s happening up front. Perhaps there is a longer cut that ties together the disparate plot strands and makes us care for the characters. Whatever, we’re hoping that the director will keep his feet firmly on terra firma for his next outing.

But, for the moment this is a case of Ground Control to Major Bong, your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong.

Rob Daniel
Letterboxd: RobDan
Podcast: The Movie Robcast

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