Got slipped a Mickey

It's hard to come up with something innovative in the sci-fi world these days. There are a lot of easy comparisons, especially if one is engaging in the "exploration of strange, new worlds" theme. It's even more difficult if the story you're trying to tell only has SF trappings in order to deliver a message and/or metaphor, since you're mostly serving the message in that case, rather than trying to spin a somehow new tale about space travel, aliens, and the future. It's easy to fall into the "been there, done that" realm. That's, unfortunately, what happens with Mickey 17, Bong Joon Ho's first film since the masterful Parasite.  There's a brilliant absurdist premise in the first third of the film, but it then degenerates into bog-standard lessons about alien interactions, facsimiles of current politics, and an adventure story that really lacks adventure.

That brilliant premise is the idea of Mickey (Robert Pattinson) being what is known as an Expendable: a worker whose entire mental and physical imprint are stored in machines so that he can be cloned and returned to life after engaging in whatever lethal situation is deemed necessary by the corporatist/nationalist overlords controlling humanity's venture into deep space. Mickey volunteers for this duty because of mistakes made back home and then ruefully accepts his fate as a societal loser who regularly dies in increasingly gruesome ways. It's that idea- the casual disposal of crucial labor by massive corporations -that not only provides incredible (morbid) humor to the first act, but which created a foundation to build upon that I think might have produced something worthy of memory if Bong had decided to continue with it. But about halfway through act 2, we suddenly pivot to the alien encounter, such that Mickey's societal status becomes virtually irrelevant to the plot and the film is taken over by Mark Ruffalo's pointedly Trumpian performance as right-wing politician, Ken Marshall, who rants about the aliens as a threat, despite their clear lack thereof, and preens for the camera in the hopes that everyone will continue worshipping him. I mean, I can see that just by watching CNN for an hour. Despite Bong's protestations that Marshall was intended to be a representation of "authoritarian figures throughout history", it's a bit too on-the-nose to make any 2025 audience think of anyone else.

And that's part of the problem, in that that character isn't that interesting and neither is anything going on around him. The absurd situation of Mickey constantly being tossed into an almost literal meat grinder and simply shrugging his shoulders and getting on with it was a far more interesting scenario and more potent metaphor for our current circumstances. Instead, we spend a lot of time with CGI-rendered alien hedgehogs and attempts to communicate with them and understand their society and protect them from the depredations of corporatists and yadda, yadda, yadda. I went from cackling with glee for the first 45 minutes to confused for the middle 45 and finally to really wanting it to be over for the final third. We went from wondering how this could possibly continue and where it might end up to yawning at predictable action scenes and wondering how our meek, put-upon, sympathetic main character had transformed into Stock Action Hero. I mean, I guess it's still considered character development if your character goes from painfully human with obvious failings to cardboard cutout with Teflon skin, but it's probably not the kind of development most intelligent viewers really want to see. Meanwhile, interesting characters like Dorothy (Patsy Ferran), the only sympathetic scientist among those maintaining Mickey, get left behind with the (ahem) Expendable plot, and plot device characters like Timo (Steven Yeun) become more central. And this is to say nothing of characters that don't seem to serve any purpose whatsoever to any of the plot lines, like Kai Katz (Anamaria Vartolomei), who might have been a second love interest or a target of Marshall's idiot cult or a challenge to Mickey's newfound role as prime communicator with the aliens, but turns out to be none of these before she disappears from view.

Bong insisted that he had final cut of the film, but I'm not sure he wants to claim that too loudly, because it means that as writer, director, and editor, he's solely responsible for a story that blew away in the breeze halfway through his film and then tottered along on the most overused legs since A Trip to the Moon for the rest of it. It's not a bad film and might be worth seeing just for the humor of the first act. But it's not something that should have any staying power at all because it's mostly just recycled, like Mickey.