"Mickey 17"

In a world in which Trump is president again, I can only describe the phenomenon of Mickey 17, the latest movie from Oscar-winning Parasite director Bong Joon Ho, as “quaint”. Well, actually, no, I can also describe it as a lot of things — “fucking goofy and retarded”, for one — but let’s just leave it at “quaint”. 

Mickey 17 started production in 2022 and supposedly stopped in 2023, but it is clear that many of the movie's scenes had been re-shot and thrown in within the past few months leading up to the November '24 presidential elections in the United States. The movie is decidedly a product of the early 2020s, the years that witnessed the final death throes of 2010s “woke” mania, when the stink of rot in Hollywood was reaching a fever pitch, with overbearing movies centred around minority issues – Moonlight, Parasite, CODA, Everything Everywhere All At Once – winning 'Best Picture' at the Oscars several years in a row. If only Bong had managed to get Mickey 17 released within this timeframe, this brief window of time when the novelty of such goofy media still made it tolerable to audiences – then it might have been saved from the weight of secondhand embarrassment it induces when watching it now.

With a joint scifi premise of human cloning and the colonisation of an alien planet, the movie ought already to have enough on its plate to tackle without needing to detour down social-political-psychological avenues, but it begs to differ. It's quick to shed the weight of its scifi premise and all the brainy imaginings that those would entail. Like many of Bong's previous movies, the greater (and more rewarding) challenge of speculative fiction is passed over for trite social justice moralising. Speculative propositions are merely backdrops to replicate the same message of social activism that plagues the Western world today. In Mickey 17, “world-building” amounts to nothing more than a quick scene of a black newscaster – played by an actor with awful delivery, I might add – saying some mumbo-jumbo at a convention centre where a line is forming to apply for the space mission where most of the movie will later be set; up till the very end of the movie, I had no clue what the point of anything was: what the point of the space mission was, what the point of the "Expendables" class of people are, why human cloning was developed, why human cloning was developed for space travel, what roles the various people on the space colony are supposed to have, and what exactly Mark Ruffalo’s character is supposed to be. 

Mark Ruffalo plays the “dictator” of the space colony in a manner that the audience is supposed to recognise, nudge nudge, as an amalgamation of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. The obvious flaw is that these are two distinct people operating in two vastly different industries. The final product that emerges out of Mark Ruffalo's self-important theatrics is something more akin to a delusional alcoholic. He attempts to mimic Trump's iconic, chatty delivery in some scenes but ends up more like Kamala, with slurred, incoherent speech that sounds as if it's being read off a teleprompter or improvised on the spot. The thing we're supposed to take away from his performance is merely the affect and not substance. It is supposed to be enough that Ruffalo is merely affecting the mannerisms of "dictators" without actually having any coherent dictatorial plan that impresses audiences with the scope of its threat.

Cinephile darling Toni Collete is trotted out to pull her neurotic WASP housewife schtick again; she tires the audience with unfunny interjections about "sauce". Unknown random black actress Naomi Ackie joins this star-studded cast to play "Nasha", a character who is indistinguishable from every other “strong, black female lead” of the past decade, complete with gap teeth. Anamaria Vartolomei plays a comedic and emotional relief "bisexual disaster" character called Kai who adds nothing to the movie. Steven Yeun plays Mickey's best friend who is introduced at the start of the movie for a brief and ludicrous scene only to disappear for a large chunk in the middle and reappear again, briefly, at the end.

Robert Pattinson plays “Mickey”, a dim-witted and cartoonishly simple-minded “Expandable”, which is supposed to be some class of worker that can be replenished at will. As an Expandable, Mickey agrees to have his DNA and memories uploaded to a, er, brick and to be cast into dangerous or experimental situations where exist the threat of dying, and to be reprinted later as the need arises. Escaping loansharks on Earth, he signs up to be an Expandable on the space mission, where he effectively serves as the guinea pig for experiments by the spaceship's science division, including a gruesome one to find a vaccine against toxic particles in the air of the new planet they're colonising.

You're supposed to read Mickey as one of the American left behind and downtrodden to whom Trump’s promises have mistakenly appealed to, a section of the heartland populace who simply "don't know any better" with "knowing any better" here meaning to be shown some TLC by an astronaut black gf. In some scenes there are glimpses into an alternative reading of his character, as a metaphor for many young, white men in the Western world who are considered “expandable”, whose work and character contribute largely to the continuation of Western civilisation, yet whose lives are considered less important than, and even a threat to, the minority/special-needs populations of their countries. But, no, this is too much to hope for. The moral of the story is that Mickey is just plain dumb, QED. He can't catch up as fast as the tenacious minorities can, so he is rightly an expandable and should just sit down while a black woman is talking, but because he is a victim of the rapacious capitalist class (and here Bong draws "the capitalist class" as goofily as he has in his previous movies, as either a murderous sadistic loanshark or an Elon-Trump "dictator", in order to drive home the idea that these people are bad, like really bad, ok!) and because he readily gets under the boot, concedes his inferiority and his space gf's superiority, etc., then he doesn't deserve to die like other white men do. Or, well, at least not to have to die multiple times.

If I'm being generous, I might suppose that what Bong really wanted to explore was a late-blooming plot-line related to the creatures inhabiting the planet that the spaceship has settled in, and not the confusing American political satire. Said creatures are somewhere in a cross between woolly mammoths and the sand worms from Dune. There is a little caper at the end where a baby from the mammoth-worm clan has been kidnapped for "sauce" by the Ruffalo-Collette tyranny, and has to be returned to Mama matriarch mammoth-worm in order to restore peace and order across the lands once more, etc. – it is a similar plot-line to Bong's 2017 film Okja, which makes me suspect that this is his actual interest in this movie, and not the many US politics-centric wisecracks that seem to have been tossed in within the past few months.

The movie is filled with so many preposterous and diversionary plot lines that it never becomes tedious to watch, which I suppose is a mark in its favour compared to all the other rubbish produced over the past few years along these same American-political-satire veins. But, having come too late to take part in the heyday of those movies, Mickey 17 arrives in 2025 as something of an embarrassment, like an elaborately made-up guest arriving at a costume party right at the hour when everyone's already packing up to leave.