Mickey 17 (2025)

Score: 4 / 5

When an auteur throws a curveball your way, pay attention. Bong Joon-ho's first outing since his huge Parasite Oscar haul will surely have many a critical eye, as all major award winners do. Mickey 17 is a curious follow-up, and anyone unfamiliar with his work prior to Parasite will feel it's a bizarre divergence from the norm. And perhaps it is. But that's what Bong does best. Like Yorgos Lanthimos in some ways, Bong bends genre and style to suit the way he feels about his material, whether it's cute fantasy adventure mixed with harsh reality in Okja, vaguely western action and drama in The Host's monster mayhem, horror and comedy in the crime thriller Mother, or of course riveting action in the dystopian sci-fi allegory Snowpiercer. And in this, Bong's third English-language feature, he explores similar political themes as he did in Okja and Snowpiercer, perhaps suggesting that he knows what that particular market needs to see. 

Based on a recent novel, the story follows the reincarnated misadventures of the titular Mickey (Robert Pattinson). A rapidly dying Earth leads teams of colonists to other planets, and hoping to escape some loan sharks, Mickey and his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) join one headed to icy Niflheim. As in any Bong film, the symbols pile up quickly, but note that Niflheim is the world of the dead in Norse mythology. Timo is accepted as a shuttle pilot, but Mickey has no real skills, so he signs up as an "Expendable," which is a job nobody else wants and that the company bureaucrats are shocked to learn Mickey enthusiastically wants. What he doesn't know is that the name is quite apt, and he is signing on to be truly expendable. Cloned repeatedly (hence the number after his name), Mickey will be tasked with any dangerous maintenance or expeditionary need in order to assess Niflheim's suitability for colonizers to, well, colonize.

This means that many, many Mickeys die over the course of this film. Whether it's to fix something on the ship as deadly debris flies by or being the first on the distant planet to remove his helmet and suffer new terrestrial infections, Mickey's life and death and renewed life are less a miracle than a mockery of existence. There's nothing personally fulfilling about the salvific job, and despite his sacrifices, the other crew members scorn Mickey with disdain as less than their collective worth. After each demise, Mickey is reprinted, essentially, in a printer of organic matter with his own memories replanted into his brain. Through extensive voiceover narration, Mickey speculates this cycle isn't as bad as what he'd have endured and suffered at the hands of those gangsters back home. And so he keeps dying, in grotesque and often rather dull ways, such as when he's used to test vaccines.

Pattinson is incredible in this role, going completely gonzo in an unhinged performance that inexplicably marries the tonal disparity at work. After all, the sci-fi trappings abound while larger-than-life characters act like fools and discuss the environmental, humanitarian, and economic impacts of colonialist practices on this mysterious new planet. That's a lot of ground to cover. Who better to guide us through the complex dynamics at work here than someone expendable by definition? Pattinson's wide-eyed Mickey speaks in a strained high voice as the pushover wimp who dies repeatedly, and it's his growth into a fairly banal hero that the film champions as truly salvific in the end. Friendship and teamwork help, of course, with notable friend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) offering Mickey companionship as well as support, seeing him for the brave and kind soul he is beneath a nervous exterior.

Which is why, when Mickey 17 is presumed dead by an opportunistic Temo, the lab prints a new version, Mickey 18, but this one is different. Aggressive and arrogant, Nasha recognizes a change and grows suspicious. Pattinson's firing on all fronts in the dual role, and it's never less than an absolute pleasure to behold. When Mickey 17 unexpectedly returns, they have to navigate a new reality, one punishable by the government's express ban on "multiples." Questions of identity and humanity abound, who deserves to live and why, even regarding the sexual imagination of his girlfriend, but I'll leave those fun thematic points for you to discover for yourself.

As Mickey toils, the true authors of his suffering -- which, by the way, is far more funny than I'm making it sound -- come into clearer focus. Kenneth Marshall, the tyrannical businessman and government leader in charge of the whole operation, and his wife Ylfa are paranoid self-aggrandizing supremacists who believe they deserve to be in charge and that any question or threat to their particular brand of elite eccentricity is deserving of capital punishment. Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette one-up Pattinson's gonzo acting choices in performances that frankly I found a bit grating by film's end despite their obvious intention for that reaction. Ruffalo and his false teeth and stilted speech pattern had me laughing aloud in the theater, while Collette's character's obsession with sauces is burned into my brain as the most inventive and bizarre trait possible in such a bit part. Their allegorical significance to a certain failed businessman and president cannot be overstated, and the film missteps briefly in overtly tying them to reality. At one point we see a room of their supporters wearing red caps and it was disappointingly obvious from Bong, whose point had already been made manifest by that time.

The film gets a bit needlessly convoluted in its second half, once Mickey 18 bludgeons his way onto the scene, even with Pattinson's endless voiceover. Its jumbled amalgamation of themes such as economic hardship and disparities, the worth of human life and the cost of experimentation on flesh, environmental abuse and collapse, and authoritarian efforts for colonization create a heady mixture that, if not for Bong's signature satirical flair, might feel unfocused and overwhelming. It even includes CGI alien critters -- excuse me, "creepers" -- in a significant if, again, obvious thematic conceit. A few too many subplots keep the lengthy runtime moving quickly, though, along with evocative cinematography from Darius Khondji and a gloomily sinister production design reminiscent of '70s and '80s ideas of futuristic space travel. Mickey 17 might not be what any of us were expecting from Bong, but it's exactly what he does best.

Parasite (2019)

Score: 5 / 5

Bong Joon-ho is always conscious of social inequities and class structure in his films, but Parasite may be as close to a manifesto as anything he's made yet, and it is magnificent. It's Bong at his greatest strengths and in full command of his unique craft. That is, his incredible ability to meld genre and instantly shift tone is on full display but in a controlled, contained manner that never feels excessive, unnecessary, or exploitative. And while he deftly handles heady themes and Big Ideas, Bong also crafts an astonishingly tight thriller.

Parasite begins as a satirical comedy of manners: Kim Ki-taek and his wife, son, and daughter live in poverty and in a tiny half-basement, working low-paying jobs and trying to make ends meet. Trying but failing, I should say, as we see them opening windows while they eat so the street clouds of insecticide waft in to help with pests. This kind of scene is at once hilarious and horrific, and it is often repeated in the film, as we become uncomfortably aware that the inequities of our world are at once bizarre and dangerous, ludicrous and deadly.

A friend of the family is preparing to leave for school and suggests the Kim son, Ki-woo, pose as a university student so he can tutor the daughter of a wealthy family. The Parks quickly hire Ki-woo and their daughter falls in love with him, but the Kims are quick to integrate themselves into the family. Posing as unrelated skilled workers (a therapist, a driver, and a housekeeper), they push their way into the Park household through manipulation, lies, and even framing the Parks' current employees. Everything snowballs into a very funny series of interactions and hoodwinks that culminate with the Parks leaving for a camping trip and the Kims lounging in the fancy house as if they owned the place. Could they be the titular parasites? One might think so, until the sudden turn.

I don't want to describe the plot itself here, because one of the main joys of Parasite is in the way writer/director Bong so carefully calculates his timing and execution. Every beat is used for maximum emotional and intellectual effect. Every textured surface, every light and shadow, every subtle shift of the camera forces us to live in the stylized but thickly realized world of raw class warfare. And when the movie suddenly -- and I mean so suddenly that the theater burst into gasps when it happened -- turns, it earns every bit of shock and awe it inspires. Just be aware that the parasites may not be who you expect. This is a true black comedy in that it is as funny as it is depressing, and often at the same time; pure entertainment that has a lot to say but never feels preachy, though life and death hang in the balance.