*Premise spoilers*
This is my fourth Bong Joon Ho film, though it’s only the first that I’ve been able to see in theaters. As far as weird auteurs (affectionate) go, I think I can say at this point that I really like Bong’s work, even if he’s not sort of writer/director whose films just fit me like a glove. My weird-auteur preferences tend more toward Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Taika Waititi, but I still think his films are wild, interesting, and well-made. It’s a matter of personal affinity, not talent!
What’s It About?
In the future, Mickey needs to get off Earth in a hurry, and the fastest way to do that is to apply for a job as an “expendable” on a colonial space mission. He’s given all the most dangerous assignments on the ship, with a new version of him getting printed each time he dies. Everything is (bloody) business as usual…until the day comes when they jump the gun on the printing process, making a new Mickey without realizing the current one is still alive.
Who’s in It?
We need to start, of course, with Robert Pattinson. Much like Daniel Radcliffe, I appreciate that he’s someone who starred in a huge franchise and has since become more of an odd character actor, which is much more interesting than the typical leading-man type he’d been positioned as. He plays Mickey, with much of the story revolving around Mickey 17 in particular. Mickey is weird and endearing and cracked, and he’s very definitely the sort of character I want to watch a movie about.
As for the rest of the cast, I really enjoy Naomi Ackie (Jannah from The Rise of Skywalker) as Mickey’s on-ship girlfriend Nasha. Ackie and Pattinson have a great dynamic together, and while I think Nasha is kind of underused in the first half of the movie, she really gets to come into her own later on. Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette do tag-team duty as the reprehensible elites, a politician-turned-religious-icon and his wife—they’re leading the ship to create their promised utopia on a new planet, with their “pure” paradise built on Mickey’s broken bodies. The always-welcome Steven Yeun gets in on the action as Mickey’s self-serving buddy Timo, and until the end credits, I couldn’t figure out what I knew one of the ship’s scientists from: she was played by Patsy Ferran, who was great as Jim in the National Theatre Live production of Treasure Island.
What Do I Love About It?
· This movie is super weird and kooky. Unsurprisingly, it takes a slapstick approach to Mickey’s many violent deaths, and more than once, we see the scientists scrambling when they realize a new Mickey is being printed without the gurney in place as his body slides out of the machine. There are giant bug aliens and sex diagrams, and Ruffalo’s Kenneth Mitchell is promising a white utopia while his wife Ylsa is obsessed with the potential for new sauce ingredients on an alien planet. It’s supremely wild, and I like that.
· That said, it’s also positively scathing in its class commentary—no surprise there. Of the Bong films I’ve seen so far, that’s the most enduring connective thread. Amid all the weirdness and satire is a razor-sharp indictment of elites who whip up the support of the masses, enriching themselves with promises they can’t deliver and treating the indispensable workers as disposable. I especially like how things come together in the last third of the film.
· I really like the way that small indignities can get to Mickey more than repeated gruesome deaths. In particular, he hates being asked, “What’s it like to die?”, and it’s a question that comes up for him over and over.
· The relationship being Mickey and Nasha is one of my favorite parts of the film. I love that Mickey is a lame, insecure punching bag who looks like Robert Pattinson and worships Nasha like a goddess, and I like Nasha is a cool, confident badass whose one berserk button is Mickey. These two crazy kids are made for each other, and I really enjoy watching them onscreen together.
Warnings
Violence/gore, sexual content, language, drug references, disturbing images, and strong thematic elements (including suicide.)
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