Bong Joon-ho (2025)
Mickey 17 is Bong Joon-ho’s first film since Parasite (2019) and the first he has made entirely in English. (Bong wrote the screenplay, adapted from Edward Ashton’s 2022 sci-fi novel Mickey7.) The title character is Robert Pattinson’s Mickey Barnes and the story begins in 2054. Mickey, penniless and hopeless, signs up as a disposable worker on a space mission to colonise a faraway planet. ‘Expendables’ like Mickey undertake lethal assignments for research purposes; each time an Expendable dies, technology banned on Earth is used to clone and regenerate them, restoring the Expendable’s memories etc. Mickey is now in his seventeenth version.
Robert Pattinson is supported by an eclectic group of well-known actors, including Naomi Ackie, Toni Collette, Patsy Ferran, Holliday Grainger, Thomas Turgoose, Stephen Yeun and Mark Ruffalo, who stands out in a bad way. Ruffalo plays the film’s villain: Kenneth Marshall is a sometime failed politician, now the ego-/megalomaniacal boss of the space mission. (No surprise that Trump, Musk and Bezos have all been suggested as inspirations for Marshall, painfully hard though it is to describe the first-named – or even the second-named now – as a failed politician.) For the second film running, Ruffalo is miscast in a role that requires a performer with shameless histrionic flair and a gift for stylised comedy. This high-class naturalistic actor has neither. As in Poor Things (2023), he’s embarrassing to watch.
As the first release of 2025 that I’ve seen, Mickey 17 marks the start of another cinema cycle – a good time for new-year filmgoing resolutions. Mine is to write at length about a film only when I feel like it, not whenever I feel I ought to. Bong Joon-ho’s latest makes it easy to stick to this resolution. I soon had hardly any idea what was going on.
12 March 2025
