Bong Joon-ho’s ‘Mickey 17’ is another indictment of class warfare and capitalism — but in space

I’ve been saying this for a long time and feel no need to refute myself now or at any time in the near future: South Koreans make the best movies in the world. In the 1960s, we had filmmaking innovators like Han Hyung-mo and his melodramatic throwback Madame Freedom, Yu Hyun-mok’s post-war neorealist downer Aimless Bullet, and Kim Ki-young’s masterpiece The Housemaid, which brought South Korean cinema to the eyes of the world.

But it was in the early 2000s when American audiences (myself included) began to take notice that truly remarkable filmmaking was coming out of South Korea. Three absolute masters led the pack of those early South Korean auteurs: Park Chan-wook took a hammer to genre cinema with 2003’s Oldboy, Kim Jee-woon perfected the ghost story with 2003’s A Tale of Two Sisters, and Bong Joon-ho crafted one of the finest serial killer films of all time with 2003’s Memories of Murder.

While all three have had varying levels of success in the states (Park’s 2016 flawless The Handmaiden and Kim’s 2010 neo-noir classic I Saw the Devil just to name a couple), it’s Bong Joon-ho who seems to have really broken away from the pack with his pitch-black modern classic Parasite.

Most of Bong’s films are madcap and scathing indictments of classicism, capitalism, and human stupidity, but told through differing genres and wildly inventive technical approaches to storytelling. While The Host looked at a financially struggling but loving family as they have to survive the attack of a giant monster, Snowpiercer divides the haves from the have nots across a speeding train barreling through the remnants of a destroyed world. His newest English-language film Mickey 17 takes his disgust of late-stage capitalism and combines it with a bone-weary look at how humanity treats itself, its planet, and the animals that live on it — and stirs it together with a slapstick sci-fi comedy that revels in its own ridiculousness.

Mickey 17 tells the story of Mickey Barnes (played by bottomlessly brilliant Robert Pattinson), a destitute young man drowning in debt and self loathing on an earth that is very quickly getting ready to give up the ghost. After getting in trouble with a cartoonishly dangerous loan shark, he applies to become an “Expendable” on a spaceship (led by a failed politician and his wife) headed four years out into the unknown to colonize a cold and remote planet known as Niflheim. As the only Expendable onboard, his job is simple: to do all the dangerous things that no one else can do because they equal certain death. He dies horribly, is cloned with all his memories intact, then does it all over again.

Just like Bong’s two other English language features, Okja and Snowpiercer, there’s no room for subtlety in Mickey 17. Mark Ruffalo (as the politician leading the colonizers to Niflheim) does a fearlessly broad President Donald Trump impersonation while Toni Collette (as his casually cruel wife obsessed with sauces) channels the spirit of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. All of the film’s big opinions on climate change, greed, class warfare, and capitalism are lampshaded, underlined, and as obvious as possible… and at this stage in our social and political climate, that’s a feature and not a bug.

Don’t get me wrong, I love subtlety and subtext in movies, but there’s a reason why Bong’s English movies jettison any and all moments of understatement: he thinks a majority of western audiences won’t get what he’s trying to say and I can’t really fault him for that. The time for subtlety in art is paused. These days, if you leave any room for interpretation in what you’re saying, someone else will tell you what you meant and sell it as fact. So, instead of letting us decide what he’s trying to say, Bong instead grabs his audience by their face and screams “late-stage capitalism and the loss of basic human empathy will lead you to this!!!”

As a follow-up to a modern classic like Parasite, there’s no way something as goofy and overstuffed as Mickey 17 could be anything other than disappointing. Still, the film so enjoyably conjures silly existentialist dread while moonlighting as a sci-fi comedy that, even when losing way in its second half by focusing on a thinly sketched romance featuring the luminously badass Naomi Ackie — and having a solid 15 minutes that could be excised without losing any of its power — it’s still a subversively intelligent and absurdist work from one of South Korea’s finest. It’s imperfect, but it might be what we need at this exact moment in time.

Grade: B+