Movie Review: Mickey 17
Mickey 17 is an odd little movie that has failed to find its intended audience. Brought to life by Bong Joon Ho, it’s got the very same mix of humor and horror that American audiences first saw in Parasite. It’s also fixated on the raw edges of capitalism, focused this time on empire and colonization.
In this film, as before, there’s a kind of visual binary. Which is more arresting: the offscreen dismemberment of a petty crook by chainsaw, or the radiant, capped teeth of actor Mark Ruffalo?
Given my taste for off-screen violence, you might be surprised that I vote for the teeth. As the film unspools, you (not so gradually) realize that it’s a punch to the genitals for Donald Trump. The hair is there and so is the narcissism. The Ruffalo character is Kenneth Marshall, a failed politician and ruthless oligarch, who operates in a bubble of florid grandiosity, asserting his right to extrajudicial killing. Like our unnatural president, he is unnaturally vital, surviving an assassination attempt with a bullet crease on his cheek. About the only plot element that is seriously off-brand is the prostrate devotion of Ylfa Marshall, who is joined at the waist to her soulless husband. In reality, Melania is joined only to Barron.
This could have been a much better movie. It nails the look, familiar from the Alien franchise, of a spaceship that has seen better days. Its surfaces are worn and abraded from use, and its ports are too small for the vehicles that service it. I’m a cinematic pushover for movies like these which suggest a world of friction and decay. You’ll notice it in films like the Toy Story series, where the baseboards and door frames are nicked and scratched.
But all of this falls before the cartoonish Marshall, who is a simplified version of his real-life counterpart, without a convincing backstory or persuasive charisma. There’s also the problem of fundamental incoherence. The last half of the movie is a sci-fi face-off between two identical so-called “dispensables,” designed to be reprinted as they are expended for different purposes. Mickey 17 is the gentle original. Mickey 18 is his accidental clone, who is unaccountably snarling and aggressive. There’s something interesting about two halves of a whole, but the shift in temperament goes entirely unrecognized.
If there is a constant, it’s the appealing “Crawlies.” Positioned as the native inhabitants of Niflheim, the world Kenneth Marshall aims to subdue, they are gentle creatures who know the difference between their Mickeys. They are also grown-up versions of tardigrades, those real-life “water bears” who have been shot into space and return to Earth without obvious wear.
Speaking for myself, I love the way they look, somewhere between a bug and a croissant. The Crawlie chieftain is still more appealing, a mouthy version of Aloysius Snuffleupagus. In the last analysis, Bong passes this test: aliens who look, not like humans, but themselves.