Through no fault of his own, Bong Joon Ho is a man out of time. What claim can even the most unrestrained cinema satirist have on our attention when the world’s foremost provocateur, stream-of-consciousness back-flipper and fomenter of chaos occupies the White House?
Mickey 17 (opening Friday, March 7), Bong’s drolly amusing social critique wrapped, burrito-style, in the genre accoutrements of a science-fiction movie, is far from the South Korean writer-director’s peak of outrageousness. That would be Parasite, his out-of-nowhere Oscar-winning 2019 hit that probed the gap between the have-nots and the haves with savage and shocking fury.
Five years on, Bong isn’t as focused on the working (under)class plunging knives into the superrich. (Timing is everything — Luigi Mangione single-handedly moved that conversation from the entertainment section to the front page last December.) The proletariat’s goal in the English-language Mickey 17 is simply surviving the unceasing exploitation of labor, a mission impossible paradoxically embodied by a character whose job description is to die, and die, and die another day.
To escape the homicidal intentions of a loan shark, sad sack Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) and devious business partner Timo (Steven Yeun) get hired onto a spaceship that bigwig Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Yifa (Toni Collette) are steering to a faraway planet. On the four-and-a-half-year journey, Mickey and cop Nasha (a righteously angry and expansively cursing Naomi Ackie) fall in love.
We learn all this via flashback; Mickey 17 opens with the titular character dazed and injured on the snow-covered planet Nilfheim. The year is 2054 and the poor guy is an “expendable” who, because he can be “reprinted” and regenerated endlessly (ain’t digital technology grand?), is given potentially fatal tasks like breathing and testing Nilfheim’s atmosphere for viruses that could wipe out the human passengers.
