The perks that come from winning an Oscar go beyond the honor of taking home the most prestigious award in all of cinema. Once that gold statue enters someone's hand, people from all over the industry are hungry to strike while the iron is hot and get into business with them. For director's, this usually means getting an obscene amount of money and full creative control on a project that almost certainly never would be greenlit under any other circumstances. Sweeping sci-fi satire Mickey 17 was the project that Bong Joon-ho chose to use his Parasite Oscar cache on, and I'm happy to say that the Korean auteur made damn good use of this special opportunity as it's probably his best English-language movie yet.
Based on Edward Ashton's 2022 novel Mickey7, Mickey 17 tells the story of the down-on-his luck Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson). Mickey along with his friend Timo (Steven Yuen) are in serious debt to a vicious loan shark after their macaroon stand fails to take off and have no way to pay him back. Desperate to avoid being murdered, Mickey and Timo sign up for a multi-year space expedition led by controversial failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) that is aiming to colonize a distant arctic planet called Niflheim. Where the connected Timo is able to get a job as a pilot, the only way that Mickey can get onboard on the flight is as an "expendable"-a lowly job which sees him carry out any dangerous tasks that arise during their journey and agree to get cloned each time he dies using technology that was banned on Earth after it was abused for nefarious purposes by its inventors. Mickey's taxing, thankless job is going fine until an error by the ship's crew leads to them making an 18th version of him while the 17th one is still alive. This means that Mickey is a "multiple" and Marshall has determined that in the case of "multiples", every version of that person is to be killed. Aided by longtime girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie)-who works as a security agent on the ship, the two vastly different Mickeys have to come together, and dodge being detected by Marshall in order to avoid meeting a permanent end.
Despite a reported blockbuster budget ($118 million) that's over 2x higher than the previous most expensive movie he made (2017's Okja), Bong Joon-ho didn't sell out at all with Mickey 17. The overarching anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, pro-environmentalism themes that he explored in his previous English-language movies (Snowpiercer, the aforementioned Okja) remain just as prevalent as here, the high concept sci-fi premise doesn't dilute the character-driven goals of the narrative in the slightest and the comedy in the script is biting and goofy in equal measure. Whether these elements come together as smoothly as they do in his Korean films is another thing entirely (I personally don't believe that they do), but getting an unmistakable Bong Joon-ho joint at a moment of his career where he could've elected to make something sunnier or safer is still a big win.
What powers Mickey 17 through its occasional woes with pacing and narrative cohesion is the impeccable work from its cast. Pattinson adds another standout entry to the impressive body of work he's built up over the past 7-8 years with a sensational turn as the constantly evolving Mickey Barnes. He brilliantly captures the desperation, despair and fear that drives Barnes to sign off on being exploited by the shittiest, dumbest people in the universe in service of making their awful dreams come to fruition and the interplay between the unassuming, disarmingly sweet Mickey 17 and bitter, temperamental Mickey 18 is a riot. After seeing the magic he worked here with such a tricky, comedic-leaning role that required him to play so many different versions of the same character, I'm more convinced than ever that his upcoming turn in Kristoffer Borgli's The Drama is going to be a grand slam.
In terms of the supporting cast, Ruffalo and Ackie shine the brightest. Ruffalo returns to his hilarious Poor Things register by playing another despicable, insecure buffoon who starts spiraling when his quest for power and admiration fails to materialize in the way he had hoped while Ackie brings heart, compassion and grit to a role that could've been pretty routine in the hands of a lesser performer. The romantic and comedic elements of this story don't work without these two being flexible enough performers to bounce off the variety of energies Pattinson brings to the scenes they share, and Bong deserves just as much as credit for these ace casting choices as he does for trusting Pattinson to play a series of weird, lovable guys.
Mickey 17 is a huge win for studios trusting a director's vision. Sure, it's rough around the edges, but it's a consistently engaging and often tremendous piece of work. The industry would be in a better place if we had more blockbusters that felt like products of their director opposed to whatever a corporate boardroom or focus group would like to see. Of course, the odds of the radical idea of giving creative control to the creatives materializing are really low, especially now with the impending recession that the big, beautiful mind of one of the biggest inspirations for Kenneth Marshall has the whole fucking world hurdling towards, but at least Bong was able to make a strong argument for the cause when he cashed in his golden statue ticket.
Grade: B
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