“Mickey 17”, Die to Live

Bong Joon Ho returns to the realm of fantasy after the hyper-realistic Parasites (2019), adapting Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey 7, which premiered at the 75th Berlinale. The Korean director directs Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo and Anamaria Vartolomei in a cartoonish sci-fi satire, in the vein of Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017), where the premise is the infinite successive (not simultaneous) cloning of people, for the benefit of humanity, its progress and well-being.

Naturally, in a world dominated by greed, ambition and disregard for human and animal rights, this procedure, which Mickey Barnes (Pattinson) accepts without reading the fine print, becomes a permanent dying and being reborn in the most vile ways imaginable, for the so-called expendables. On the run from the gangsters who hound him, the protagonist sets off on a mission into space, captained by a perfidious politician who speaks like Trump and his wife (Ruffalo and Colette), pantomime baddies, who manipulate the crew with promises of success and power in their colonising exploits, even while wearing the fascist uniform, showing the dullness and lack of values of their followers.

The most interesting part of the plotting is, however, left out, evident on every one of the many occasions when the fellow travellers ask Mickey what it’s like to die. Metaphysics is left out of the equation and so blatantly that we think Bong Joon Ho purposely dodges the answer, leaving us with the pouty or pitying face with which the pathetic, submissive clone of himself takes curiosity for granted.

The director of Mother (2009) has relied on a budget of 150 million dollars, a team that includes Darius Khondji (cinematographer of Okja) and production designer Fiona Crombie to tell us again about post-capitalism, politician-businessmen who dream of a world full of white, superior beings (who will be nothing without the expendables and the ignorant slaves) and use science and technology with the same scruples as Hitler. Mickey 17 also deals somewhat with ethnic cleansing, here represented by the endangered creepers, creatures native to the colonisable planet, treated as undesirable and menacing beasts, whose true peaceful and gentle nature only kind-hearted beings are able to grasp.

When the clone is duplicated, believing Mickey 17 to have fatally disappeared on a mission —with which the film begins in media res— a factor is introduced that reanimates the film, with the play of doubles, like opposing twins, where Mickey 18 has inexplicably overcome genetic memory with the addition of personality factors that the previous version completely lacks. However, this resource is underutilised for the sake of entertainment, instant banter and character enhancement of the apathetic and conformist 18. To his credit, Pattinson’s commendable performance, whose pitiful face gives way to a defiant, cocky impersonator whose accent is even different.

Bong Joon Ho gives a delivers a show, for those who appreciate it, without innovating or surprising, the pair of villains is tiresome and repetitive, but Pattinson embroiders it and the plot, leaky and all, is still interesting, although if given the choice, I’ll take the cynicism of black humour and let the broad-brush satire pass, which entertains almost the entire two hours and nineteen minutes, in which we see people die, be reborn and accept 18 times a destiny accepted by mistake, with the same irresponsibility of those who vote for characters and not politicians, hoping that the fox will watch over the chickens.