The world is at once scarily familiar and thoroughly, enjoyably loony tunes in “Mickey 17,” the latest Bong Joon Ho freakout. Bong is the South Korean filmmaker best known for “Parasite,” a ferocious 2019 comedy about class relations that spares no one, including viewers whose laughs eventually turn into gasps of visceral horror. Few filmmakers can shift moods and tones as smoothly as Bong, or have such a commensurately supple way with genre. You never know what to expect in one of his movies other than the unexpected, although it’s a good guess that, at one point, something monstrous will show up.
Opening in 2054, “Mickey 17” takes place in an uneasily recognizable future that holds a cracked mirror to the present. It is a very funny but very serious story about pretend winners and losers and how heroes struggle when power-hungry push comes to money-grabbing push. That is the case with the title schlimazel, Mickey, a guy with a confused smile and a kick-me sign on his back. Played with soulful haplessness by Robert Pattinson, Mickey is a nice, not especially sharp guy who, having signed up with a space expedition, is in the wrong place at the wrong time for foolish reasons. He’s to blame, sort of.
Bong wrote the screenplay, adapting it from Edward Ashton’s 2022 science-fiction novel “Mickey7.” The science in the movie is fairly minimal as such futuristic stories go; it includes a souped-up printer that Mickey becomes intimately familiar with during his wiggy adventures in inner and outer space. Following a disastrous business venture, he and his feckless friend, Timo (Steven Yeun), have fled Earth to work on a spaceship run by Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a congressman turned megalomaniacal cult leader whose acolytes like red hats. Marshall and his wife, a scary slinkstress, Ylfa (Toni Collette), plan on colonizing what he believes is an uninhabited new world, a snowy white “planet of purity.”
By the time you have entirely grasped what Marshall and Ylfa are up to, who and what they are, the ship is on the planet, and Mickey has died — 16 times, to be exact — in his role as the ship’s “Expendable.” Used to test viruses and other threats, Mickey undergoes brutal trials, and ends up dying on the job only to be reprinted in externally identical form. There are bugs and normal mishaps, as with any software update. When the movie opens, Mickey 17 has just plunged into a planet crevasse. Timo, who’s zipping nearby, isn’t interested in rescuing Mickey, who is, after all, disposable. All Timo wants to know is, What’s it like to die?
It's a question that other people on the ship like to ask Mickey, which adds to the sadness that this movie has even when it's at its most jovial and carnivalesque. As he does, Bong takes a while to fully show his hand. Instead, working swiftly, he introduces this future with characteristic visual flair, flashes of beauty, spasms of comically couched violence and a palpable warmth that attenuates the more abject turns. He also gives Mickey a shipboard romance with Nasha, a lovely security guard who becomes Mickey's protector and is played by Naomi Ackie. This affair gets heated up the story. Nasha is normal, just and true, and she helps humanize Mickey. Bong often plays Mickey’s deaths for laughs, but he wants you to feel them.
And you do feel them, at times deeply, amid the flashbacks, pratfalls, peppy edits, roving camerawork and the images of one after another Mickey being dumped like garbage. These scenes can be rightly grim, yet they have a queasily amusing kick because of Bong’s lightness of touch and Mickey’s deadpan fatalism. One of Bong’s undersung strengths is that he’s great with actors, and the work that he and Pattinson do with the character’s voice and silent-clown physicality is crucial to pulling off the movie’s tonal expansiveness. Mickeys come and go, but you get to know No the best. 17. He has a distinct nasal whine (shades of Adam Sandler) that, as humor gives way to anguish, becomes a clarion call for decency.
Mickey is so gentle and seemingly helpless that it’s easy to be on his side, but part of what makes him sympathetic is that his misfortune isn’t a matter of just predisposition or predestination, the way it often is in American movies. Mickey tends to make mistakes, and didn’t read all the paperwork when he joined the expedition, but, really, who reads the fine print? He was desperate, owed money and needed to make a fast exit. So, alongside other distressed applicants, he found a solution in a market economy in which everything, life included, has a price. In this case, the cost is a perilous, exploitative job, one that’s the equivalent of, say, butchering factory-farmed hogs in a slaughterhouse. Except that Mickey is the hog.
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Bong keeps things zipping along, and with such nimbleness that the movie’s heavier ideas never weigh it down. He jabs rather than pounds as he takes on targets — authoritarianism, comic-book heroics, the vanity of power — while playfully mixing moods and acting styles. As he has done elsewhere, he folds more naturalistic performances like Ackie’s in with hyperbolic turns, something Pattinson deploys full tilt later in the story. Colette, for instance, turns on Ylfa’s brights with wolfish smiles and waves around nails as sharp as knives while Ruffalo goes as big as Marshall’s teeth. Jutting out his chin and chest Mussolini-style, Ruffalo gives form to a personality that wavers between puffed-up braggadocio and deflated neediness.
There’s an unmistakable Trump-world quality to Ylfa and Marshall’s larger-than-life personalities and luxurious quarters aboard the spaceship, an association that you sometimes hear in some of Ruffalo’s vocalizations. That gives the movie a frisson of topicality, though these allusions are tucked into a movie stuffed with many other ideas and interests; among other things, this is a distinctly pro-animal movie (like Bong’s “Okja”) with a sharp antivivisectionist sting. Mickey is effectively the expedition’s lab rat, one who’s repeatedly sacrificed in the name of the greater good, a theme that Bong underlines when the planet’s resident population of charming, periodically alarming creatures takes on a greater role.
“Mickey 17” is, like “Parasite,” a deeply unsettling story about haves and have-nots. Marshall and Ylfa live in gilded luxury serving (gross!) synthetic meat to a chosen few while most workers trudge through dingy halls and choke down even grayer rations. Like the working-class crew of the extraterrestrial tugboat in Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” Mickey, Nasha and the rest of the workers are headed into uncharted, dangerous territory. There will be monsters and, yes, blood. In a film that teeters on apocalyptic despair but also lifts you to the skies because Bong is finally an idealist and not only one of the great filmmakers working today, there will also be love, kindness, camaraderie, heroism, and sacrifice.
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