This story contains mild spoilers for Mickey 17.
When the indie distributor Neon recently won their second Best Picture Oscar with Anora, it also marked the fifth anniversary of their first win: for Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, a South Korean thriller about a lower-class family that cons their way into a wealthy family’s life. Now Bong’s follow-up film is finally in theaters, where it is poised to both become his highest-grossing movie in the U.S. and lose a bunch of money for Warner Bros., who for the past year has appeared ambivalent bordering on reluctant about actually releasing it. In this big-studio limbo and in the contents of the film itself, Mickey 17, starring Robert Pattinson as an “expendable” worker subject to seemingly endless on-the-job deaths and corporate-funded rebirths, is Bong’s most American film yet.
It’s not, however, his first English-language film. In fact, Parasite is the outlier in that respect; when it was released in 2019, it had been a decade since Bong made a movie in his native Korean, with the English-language Snowpiercer released in 2013 following similar corporate shelving, and Okja receiving a comparably smooth (some might even say frictionless) berth on Netflix. Bong’s work is recognizable across nationalities and languages, yet there are noticeable differences between his fully Korean films and his Hollywood co-productions; Parasite fans may be surprised to discover a baggier, less gracefully zig-zagged thriller in Mickey 17. The film begins with Mickey (Pattinson) already doing grunt work for a group of colonizers on a distant planet; he explains in wobbly-voiced, schnooky tones that he and his partner in petty crime (Steven Yeun) sought to escape some murderous gangsters by slipping the surly bonds of Earth and entering the equally surly bonds of, essentially, indentured servitude.
How it works is this: Having signed (without reading carefully) his contract as an expendable, Mickey has been used as a guinea pig during the space flight and now the colonization, performing tasks that often turn out to be worse than they look. (When he’s sent out in a spacewalk to make some minor repairs, his bosses are actually testing the effects of radiation exposure.) Once they kill him, his body is disposed of, and he is “reprinted” into a new body, his full memories intact. His life has enough continuity to maintain a relationship with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a fellow worker (but not an expendable; Mickey is alone in that field, in part because the practice is only legal outside of Earth).
This apparent scientific miracle is hilariously undercut almost every time the human-maker expels a new Mickey and stutters like an office copier struggling through a paper jam. Greater complications arise when the seventeenth Mickey, fully expected to meet his doom via a swarm of bug-like “creepers” out on the frozen plains, doesn’t actually die. His bosses unknowingly print an eighteenth Mickey before the seventeenth makes it back to base. “Multiples” being strictly forbidden, the Mickeys are initially pitted against each other, rather than their cruel overlords.
This all sounds far more straightforward than it plays, which is both the buzzy strength and part-time frustration with Mickey 17. The hook of a worker who lives to be repeatedly murdered by his job is a sharp, potent one, and makes the movie sound like an ideal companion to Parasite. In reality, it’s more like Okja, Bong’s movie about a young girl fighting to save a genetically modified “super-pig” from the American meat industry, and not just because the creepers inevitably turn out to be far less creepy than they look. Both films ramble away from their central conceit just as we’re getting excited by their possibilities, rather than uncoiling with Parasite’s spinning-plate virtuosity.
