Mickey 17 Movie Review: Bong Joon-ho's sentiment to exalt an excellent film of philosophical origin
We are all guinea pigs, the Korean director tells us, who create a work full of elements, structured however according to a narrative logic that approaches a rebellious and hopeful fable. The protagonist a double Robert Pattinson. In theaters from March 6.
The skill of the great director is demonstrated precisely when the physiological decline of a film arrives. In the moment in which the screenplay goes off the rails, it is disconnected from the supporting cinematic structure.
In this sense, the author's ability does not live in bringing the script back to the chosen boundary, but in supporting it without forcing: the best direction is the one that adapts to the writing and not the opposite. The paradigm of this concept is found in Mickey 17, written and directed by Bong Joon-ho (in his first film after the masterpiece Parasite), and based on the novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton.
In fact, when the film seems to be losing its awareness - bringing strange and tender crawling beings into the scene - the director chooses to shift the focus, making the hero of the moment (or rather, the heroes) perform the best of catharsis, between epic, irony and tenderness.
Clearing up doubts: yes, the Korean author's film is excellent, compressed into a reading full of elements and meanings, but also lucid and splendidly positive in the characterization of the characters and the story. An answer that emancipates itself from the dazzling ruthlessness of Parasite, harmoniously taking up the themes of Okja and Snowpiercer (the film, not the terrible Netflix series). And therefore showing itself to be more human and courageously more hopeful.
Mickey 17: a double Robert Pattinson
Science fiction, someone whose name we don't remember saying, is the most malleable and fluid genre of all. It allows you to face the ellipse in total freedom and total ease. It breaks down the doubt of credibility and emphasizes at best the social warnings typical of the best sci-fi works. In Mickey 17 there is speciesism (and anti-speciesism), colonialism, populism, and the technological obsession that turns its gaze to science without ethics and without scruples.
Because a world cannot be considered ethical if it aims at the crude exploitation of human material. It is 2054 and, after two failed presidential campaigns, the transhumanist huckster Hieronymous Marshall (a despicable Mark Ruffalo) decides to undertake a space mission designed to colonize a remote planet, Niflheim.
Also on board the ship is Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson). To escape a ruthless loan shark, he agrees to sign a contract as an expendable, expendable. The last of the pyramid structure designed by the Nazi-fascist Marshall - accompanied by an equally despicable wife obsessed with sauces, played by Toni Collette.
The expendables are nothing more than guinea pigs: disposable men used as tests for food, medicines, and atmospheric conditions. Every time they die they can be regenerated through a 3D printer, which also contains their memories. A hellish life for the placid Mickey, if it were not for the fact that on board the ship he meets Nasha (Naomi Ackie), with whom he starts a relationship.
After four and a half years the group arrives at Niflheim, an inhospitable and frozen planet. The first to get off the ship? Obviously, Mickey. After several deaths (the air is full of unknown pathogens: a vaccine is needed), he arrives at version number 17.
Sent to alien soil (but who are the aliens, Bong Joon-ho asks?) he is believed to be devoured by the strange tardigrade-like beings that populate Niflheim. However, the "crawlers", instead of eating him, save him. Returning aboard the ship, he discovers that he has already been replicated in Mickey 18, with a very different character from his.
We are all guinea pigs
We have extended the story of the plot, as it is preparatory to better explain Bong Joon-ho's thought: we are all guinea pigs. We are the guinea pigs of populist politicians, we are the guinea pigs of the market, we are the guinea pigs of propaganda, and we are also the guinea pigs of ourselves.
The result of a standard that does not accept digressions aims to annihilate (as Mickey version 17 is annihilated) rather than to exalt the individual at the center of the community. A copy, the passive iteration, the emotional indolence that fits with physical indolence, transcending pain and even, the fear of death (which becomes downright boring for the Korean director).
It is a decidedly loaded and deliberately caricatured film that of Joon-ho (and we cite the silhouette of Mark Ruffalo, which recalls the most classic of dictators, also winking at the managers of Big-Tech with obvious references), but also well connected to the idea of great cinematographic experience, of which the director is an absolute supporter (and among the few to unite reason and feeling).
For once, Mickey 17 is also a work of answers and not just questions: in the intertwining of version 17 and version 18 (after a divertissement involving Nasha, teased by having a split boyfriend) there is the best suggestion to be grasped. Only by raising our heads, and choosing to act, can we aspire to a new humanism, which can somehow interpose itself between the hegemony of authority and the fall of civilizations, thus being decisive - also in narrative terms - concerning the evolution of the species (and of cinema itself).
Nonetheless, Mickey 17 is not a film with political diameters in the strictest sense, showing itself instead closer to the fable tinged with satire, and echoing the conflict of the double (17 and 18, underlined by the work on Robert Pattinson's voice) as a philosophical symbol of a rebellious and noble vision towards power. A power to fight, always and in any case.
Conclusions
Bong Joon-ho takes up Okja and Snowpiercer to return to talk about (decayed?) civilization, humanism, rebellion, heroism and participation. He does so by taking inspiration from Edward Ashton's novel, structuring Mickey 17 a sort of fairy-tale satire in which he blends hope and revolution.
A practical and theoretical revolution, driven by the individual as the absolute good of a society should be founded on equality and never on abuse. Great cast: a double Robert Pattinson, obviously, but also watch out for Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette. Never so despicable.