MICKEY 17

It does take some getting used to the erratic style of 'Mickey 17', a conscious melding of slapstick, black humour and aggressive melancholy. More so than many landmark international director transitioning to English-langauge filmmaking though, Director Bong has navigated that transition less by preserving his style than creative a whole different avenue of his filmmaking. Where many of his Korean-language films (even 'The Host') feel sharp and contained, 'Mickey 17' is wild, unchecked and, at times, wonderfully ridiculous. This is a silly world filled with silly people making silly, selfish decisions, and as the film goes on (and Mickey 17 finds his feet as our emotional anchor), that silliness begins to feel like a collective last grip on sanity. This isn't quite the hopeless, nihilistic world of 'Snowpiercer', but it's not far off, the fight-or-flight mode dulled by antipathy and subservience to the cult of personality. While Marshall and Ylfa enjoy their luxuries and keep the minds of their colony sedated with banal shows of comradery, the human spirit to dream of something greater than what is right in front of it fades to almost nothing.

This is where Mickey becomes the fulcrum point of the many emotional and thematic threads of the film. The concept of multiple versions of him throws Mickey's existential awareness into a tailspin. If there is only ever one of him at any given time, then death is just a skip on the record, a momentary delay before starting up again. Multiple versions though means that, when the 17th version of Mickey dies, that's it. He's dead. There's no waking up on the other side. Suddenly, life seems more precious to him, a life that, because of the regeneration process, means that not only has he taken life for granted but those around him have too. With Mickey there, death isn't as much of an issue, he'll take all the jobs where death might be involved. When Mickey is suddenly faced with his own mortality, it's as if he's the only person around him who has realised how final death actually is.

This becomes the emotional crux of 'Mickey 17', culminating in a wildly impressive climax where Director Bong's visual imagination gets to stretch its muscles, but it also leans into the thematic crux of the film as well. New technology brings exciting new possibilities, but also raises serious ethical questions. The real-world equivalent here is obviously AI, where the same questions applied to Mickey (Is each Expendable its own person? Does the technology needed to resurrect him so synthetic that he no longer is a person?) can also be applied to artificially created intelligence. It's probably lazy to trot out the 'Jurassic Park' quote of "but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should", but it just seems to become more relevant the more we push the boundaries of what is possible, and certainly feels relevant to the predicament in 'Mickey 17'. Those ethical considerations are not solved for Mickey; in fact, the fact this is happening on a spaceship away from Earth at all is proof of how those ethical questions are being avoided, but as Mickey's situation becomes increasingly more complicated and ridiculous, they become central to his whole sense of self.

Director Bong is also concerned here, once again, with the individual caught in the trap of a capitalist system. It's a theme that runs through so much of his work - and in the case of 'Mickey 17', he's taking us right into the machine. The hilarious and unsettling image of Mickey's new body being haphazardly printed over and over again is not that far from the legendary image of Charlie Chaplin being fed through the cogs in 'Modern Times' (1936), a film 'Mickey 17' feels indebted to in many ways. Mickey is on a conveyer belt, forced to accept his place in the machine and never question it. And again, there isn't anyone else around him questioning it either. It's only when he starts to see himself as an individual that he starts to comprehend the degree to which the machine is chewing him up, spitting him out and then chewing him up again, an endless cycle of capitalist mastication. And that's only scratching the surface of the many, many concerns on Director Bong's mind with 'Mickey 17', including colonisation, the abuse of the natural world, the dangers within cult of personality, the weaponisation of religion as a political tool, and the rise of fascist, right-wing politics.

Again, the film should, by all rights, crumble under all this weight, and perhaps for some it might, but what made all this chaos turn into music for me comes from Director Bong's wonderfully irreverent approach. 'Mickey 17' could have been a heavy, horrifying film, but not dissimilar to 'Dr Strangelove' (1964), it wisely decides that laughing at the absurdity of it all might work better than falling into despair. As it should, the comedy makes the sincerity at the heart of the film more accessible and makes the emotional punches more potent. Almost everything about this film is pitched to the ridiculous, from its dizzying cinematography to its cluttered and eclectic production design. A real key to its success is the editing from Jinmo Yang ('Parasite'), who is able to keep the rhythm working and multiple timelines at play, and yet give a sense of a logic to its madness. Again, this all does take some getting used to, but I would rather a major international filmmaker force my Western sensibilities to do some work to fall into their style than lose what makes their work so special in order to appease a Western audience.

The real key to landing Director Bong's specific tone though are the performances. It's quite something to see a cast of such talented actors so fully in sync with what their director is asking of them; in fact, I'd say this is the most successful example of that in Director Bong's three English-language films. Robert Pattinson is obviously the lynchpin of the film, but as truly great and hapless as his performance is, what works best is that he feels like such a compatriot for Director Bong. As off-the-wall as the director is willing to be, Pattinson takes that challenge and runs with it. Not only is Mickey 17 not at all a typical leading man, he's hardly a character you would ever want to get to know, and yet Pattinson's performance is so charming, so bizarre and so endearing that you quickly fall in love with him. It's a credit to Pattinson that he easily brings Mickey to a place of heroism, but one that's very much on the character's terms.

The supporting cast are uniformly wonderful, Naomi Ackie having an absolute ball yelling and cursing and squealing with delight as Nasha and Steven Yeun is just such a terrific piece of shit as Timo. The most bombastic performance is certainly from Ruffalo, and welcomingly so. He was such a surprise in 'Poor Things' and his performance here as Marshall (whose real-world influence is never in question) is even stranger and even more ridiculous. He's balanced beautifully by the venomous danger of Toni Collette as Ylfa, always in the ear of the "great man" with motives perhaps even more self-serving. This specificity permeates throughout the entire supporting cast, and it's not hard to imagine how lesser a film this would be if even more people weren't as in-sync as this ensemble is.

Some will likely be baffled and frustrated by 'Mickey 17'. It's not always the easiest film to grasp, always a few steps ahead of you, so for those expecting something more conventional, this may be a hinderance. However, that's the magic of Bong Joon-ho's films. He's always a few steps ahead of us, and part of our contract with him is to trust that he'll get us where he we need to get to in the end. On the way, he'll offer us a journey the likes we haven't seen before. 'Mickey 17' absolutely delivers on this, a beautifully executed piece of high-concept sci-fi with the budget and resources to realise it, underpinned by some really potent and immediate concerns, all wrapped up in an irreverent, mad-cap package that never stops surprising you. What's more, it isn't that we haven't lost the sensibilities of Director Bong's South Korean work, but that the director seems to be finding a whole different set of sensibilities working in a different language. It's like watching the most precarious game of Jenga, where each piece might topple the tower at any moment, but in the end, that all fall beautifully into place, creating something jagged and unwieldy and wonderfully impressive.