‘Mickey 17’ Is Bong Joon-Ho's Most American Movie Yet

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.

After Mickey’s exposition is out of the way, as the two Mickeys are on the verge of conflict, the movie introduces several smart ideas: One is that Mickey, as shambling and dimwitted as he sometimes appears, hasn’t quite accepted the grimness of his situation, because he understands that while his consciousness will live on seamlessly, he—the actual Mickey experiencing the death—will not, does not. The rebirth can only console the new Mickey; technology can only cheat death for the bosses, not for the worker. Mickey 18 then embodies the idea that these Mickeys are not actually identical, perhaps especially when faced with one another. He’s more aggressive, prone to violent uprising, unwilling to share.

Nasha, for her part, finds the idea of double boyfriends plenty enticing, and then the movie gets distracted for a while with a bickering love triangle of sorts that never really goes anywhere before zipping on to the next thing, which involves the colony leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), pitched somewhere between a televangelist couple and a Trump-style despot. This involves some of the strenuously “satirical” overacting that dotted both Okja and Snowpiercer; for all of the wild tonal swings of Bong’s non-Hollywood pictures like The Host or Mother, they never feel quite as self-consciously pitched to the rafters. The characters are sometimes cartoonish but rarely full-on cartoons. Scene to scene, the new movie is inventive, entertaining, and engagingly acted by Pattinson and Ackie. As a holistic experience, it's more than a little disorienting.

Does this simply come down to a difference in performing style and how I receive those performances as an American? Bong is said to give his actors a lot of leeway, and that’s certainly evident with Ruffalo, who’s doing some kind of a Trump rasp, and Collette, who has a better command of her mugging. (In order words, she doesn’t go the full Swinton-in-Snowpiercer.) Maybe the performances in Parasite or Mother seem more restrained and deadpan because I don’t speak the language at hand. But it’s also noticeable that many of Bong’s non-Hollywood movies focus on familial relationships: The Host and Parasite bring troubled families together and tear them apart, while Mother is about a woman attempting to exonerate her mentally disabled son when he’s accused of murder. There’s some relationship shorthand upfront, which the movies can then explore and deepen.

As an Ugly American, the difference between these and his English-language movies reminds me a bit of current Simpsons episodes versus the show’s better efforts past its first decade; it’s the same basic show, but the effort and the seams are more visible. The more sci-fi-heavy Mickey 17, like Okja and Snowpiercer, has a lot more explaining to do before it even gets started, and jumps around frantically as a bunch of different characters try to kill each other. This is probably appropriate for movies that engage more directly with American culture by default; the fact that Mickey 17 doesn’t have time to flesh out all of its relationships (even at a longer-than-usual 137 minutes) because it’s too busy working is probably part of the point. If it’s not, well, it sure fits anyway. Mickey 17 may be a mess, but it never feels like a surrender.