Bong Joon Ho is like an avant garde chef who’s opened a pop up kitchen in some strange part of the city you don’t know very well. Your friend convinces you to go, and you finally find the place deep down a smokey alleyway, with a wooden shipping pallet stacked in front of the unmarked door. You don’t know what to expect, but when you try the food, it’s a brilliant combination of disparate ingredients you never would have thought to put together — coconut, cloves, miso, and marshmallow fluff, let’s say — that should be off-putting but somehow works in strange concert with one another. You might not love everything you taste, but you maintain a deep respect for the madman in the kitchen who thought to put it together in the first place.
Bong’s film, set in a near future, posits several strange flavors at once — it’s a sci-fi thriller, an examination of identity politics, a satire on pompous would-be dictators (with terrible dental veneers), a love story, a comedy, and, like his previous film Okja, a pointed discourse on the way human beings arrogantly interact with other species — and mixes them together expertly to arrive at a singular flavor all his own.
Mickey (Robert Pattinson), is a sweet-faced mook who’s unprepossessing accent is like a cross between Brando’s Terry Malloy and Hoffman’s Ratso. He hooks up with the wrong “best friend,” Timo (Steven Yeun) for a business venture gone horribly wrong (Timo was somehow of the mind that macarons would be the next Big Thing), and gets badly in debt to a macabre millionaire (Ian Hanmore) who loves to watch his late-paying debtors get sawed into pieces.
In order to escape this fate, Mickey and Timo both apply for passage on the next intergalactic voyage put together by pompous, failed politico Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, sporting a set of glowingly white chompers that Rex Ryan would say are too much), and his equally noxious wife, Yifa (Toni Collette). In order to increase his chances of getting picked, Mickey lists himself as an “expendable,” which gets him on-board, but at, shall we say, a hell of a cost.
First, he runs through a scanner that takes a precise body mapping, then his memories and personality are recorded onto a shambling red brick that appears to be made out of hard sponge. From there, any time he dies — which, given the often deadly nature of his “assignments” while on board is all too common — the scientists on board need only reprint a “new” version of him to use over and over again.
As you can surmise from the title, we spend the majority of time with the 17th version of Mickey. Having been through hell and back more than a baker’s dozen times, this Mickey is sweet-natured and docile, but also endearingly hopeless. Having fallen in love with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a security guard on board the ship, in his initial iteration, he has managed to maintain his relationship with her many versions later.
Things get a good deal more complicated when they finally arrive at their new home planet, a mostly desolate frozen wasteland, whose native inhabitants are small beaver-sized creatures with rhino-like skin, and an underbelly full of teeth and undulating tentacles (dubbed “creepers” by Marshall). After a non-fatal encounter with a group of them, Mickey 17 is instead pushed back out of the ice crevasse he was marooned in, and trudges back to the home ship having fully expected to have already died. Once returned, it’s clear that things have gone seriously awry in his absence, a confusion that eventually leads to a sort of revolution from within the rest of the crew.
Bong has crafted this latest madcap recipe by adapting a novel by Edward Ashton, though we can safely assume that much of the wide range of tonal flavors and mixed genres comes from the genius himself. The result is yet another strikingly odd mish-mash of things that work in strange harmony together in often unexpected ways.
True to the director’s form, the production design is fabulous, the dingy hues of Marshall’s spacecraft, and merciless frozen wasteland of the new planet, typifying the low-wave tones of Mickey’s life. The lone bright spot for him remains his relationship with Nasha, who’s vibrancy and affirming nature gives him propulsion in ways he would normally have never had.
Bong, a born sensualist, has intentionally muted his color palette: Mickey’s world is all greys, and beiges, from his goofy-looking jumpsuit, to the textured background of the cramped quarters he shares with Nasha. Niflheim, the frozen colony they are struggling to adapt to, is a wasteland of white, any contrast in the surroundings muted by gusting snow. It is within this backdrop that Mickey finds solace in even the most remote of gestures — so committed to his miserable fate is he, when he first encounters the mammoth Mama creeper deep in the crevasse, he wishes in tired VO only for a quick death, and then actually takes umbrage when he isn’t immediately devoured (“I’m still tasty!” he exclaims plaintively).
Despite obvious shading, the film doesn’t get too deeply into its own politics, other than to show the utter, venal corruption of Marshall, an egoist of the highest order, and a coward who repeatedly, with advice from his media handlers, tries to present himself as an overstuffed strongman (Bong keeps things relatively subtle, save for a moment when Ruffalo puffs his chest out during one exaltant scene, and seems to do a stodgy, awkward version of the current president’s lone dance move). Ruffalo and Collette seem to be having a blast inhabiting their loathsome characters.
Pattinson, continuing his fascinating journey from teen heartthrob to serious character actor, plays 17 with the right blend of guilelessness and doomed acceptance. With his shoulders at a perpetual slump, and his higher pitched rasp of a voice incredulously devoid of hope, he is committed to the idea that he somehow has all this punishment coming to him.
As such, the film is essentially the story of a character resigned to live in torment — 17 suggests he was the accidental cause of his mother’s death when he was very young, and feels as if his life of misery is karmic retribution — who finally finds the means to live a more fulfilled life. The preceding 16 Mickey’s all faced one ignoble death or other (many of which orchestrated by the ship’s scientists, led by Cameron Britton’s sycophantic Dr. Akady) to the point where his life was literally one harrowing agony after another. Despite the tortures fomented by outside cruelties, Mickey’s worst enemy was always his own guilt-ridden conscience. No matter how many plagues the scientists inject into him, or force him to breathe in from inside a freezing pod, it’s pretty clear the worst punishment for Mickey has always been the one inside his own mind.
