Mickey 17

You’re So Fine
You Blow My Mind
Over 16 Times, Hey...

Mickey 17
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
South Korea/USA 2025
Warner Brothers
UK Cinema release print

Warning: Some spoilerage.

Okay... so I don’t mind a bit of Bong Joon Ho but I’ve only ever been totally blown away by him once and that was for his brilliant giant monster movie The Host. His new film, Mickey 17, is pretty much what I expected from him, to be honest (on the strength of the trailer) and I had a pretty good time with it while, not being too taken with it at the same time.

The premise is that, in the not too distant future, a failed buffoon of an American politician played by Mark Ruffallo, satirically playing him as a kind of amalgam of Trump and Musk (which is not a hard stretch to amalgamate the two, to be fair), accompanied by his wife (played by the ever reliable Toni Collette) and a huge starship full of colonists is off to found the colony of Nipple-heim on the planet of their choice. On board they take an expendable, who is a guy who can be reprinted from recycled rubbish and implanted with all his former memories... and his job is to be the ‘canary in the cage’ for the mission. If you can imagine a canary in a cage which is deliberately killed with agonising and sometimes slow death on purpose, to develop vaccines and so on, in the field.

The current Mickey is Mickey 17 and he’s played by an actor I’m not all that enamoured of, Robert Pattinson... although he does a great job here playing the title character (with a Jerry Lewis voice) and his copies, who all exhibit slightly different personalities. And we start off with him accidentally dropping into a perilous, non-survivable position, about to be eaten by creatures and being abandoned by his pal, played by Steven Yeun. From this point we flash back to get the back story as to why Mickey decided to volunteer to be an expendable in the first place, before we catch up to it again a short time later.

Meanwhile, the somewhat more over-confident (to the possible point of being almost psychotic) Mickey 18 has been 'printed'. However, Mickey 17 is instead saved by the native creatures and when he returns to the ship and to his girlfriend played by Naomi Ackie (who is more than happy to have two Mickeys to sleep with at the same time), he is now an illegal ‘multiple’.

And things get worse when the indigenous, slug/armadillo-like population are gathering to take revenge on a president who is allowing his wife to use their tails to make sauces for her cooking projects. It all gets quite gripping and suspenseful with each twist and turn and it certainly doesn’t get dull.

Pattinson and the cast are all good with some nice framing and editing going on. There are some nice ideas too, such as Mickey’s memories being backed up onto a brick etc and the 3D cloning printer jerking back and forth in the process of making a new Mickey (like a photocopier going back for another scan pass). And it is full of ideas, somewhat reminiscent of the kind of things Philip K. Dick would have been writing about in the 1950s and on to the end of his career for sure.

My biggest problem with the film is that, for all the ideas on show and explored throughout the fairly lengthy narrative, nothing really surprising ever happens. Even the somewhat benevolent nature of the alien life form on the planet is kinda telegraphed early on in the movie and so, to me at least, the film becomes more of an exercise in pulling the various narrative threads together into a sustained story without really coming off the rails. The film changes tonally on the drop of a dime, so to speak, weaving between moving drama and high comedy but, that stuff seems to fit okay together for the most part and... I dunno, it’s a good film but not a great one, is what I left the cinema thinking. I mean, I could let another ten or twenty years go by without ever visiting it again. That being said, I don’t know what it’s like as an adaptation of the book Mickey7 by Edward Ashton but it feels like it’s a novel I should definitely sit down and read at some point. Just to see how different it is and if the book is, maybe, more subtle than the big screen version.

And that’s me about done on Mickey 17, I think. It’s an okay film with some big concepts, great special effects and some nice acting choices. If you like science fiction (as opposed to just space opera) then you should have an okay time with it. An easy one to recommend but don’t expect anything much more than what it says on the tin, in this one.

Snowpiercer

Scenes From
A Carriage

Snowpiercer
South Korea/Czechoslovakia 2013
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
Anchor Bay  Blu Ray Zone A

Snowpiercer is another fine movie from Bong Joon Ho, director of the absolutely brilliant, giant monster movie The Host and the ‘so so’ multiple Oscar winner Parasite. It’s based on a comic book I’ve never actually read called Le Transperceneige so, please forgive me that I’m not able to convey whether this is an accurate adaptation of the source material or not... I just don’t know. It’s also the movie that the notorious Harvey Weinstein famously sat on and blocked from release in the US (it’s still not been released over here in the UK*) for many years now due to the director correctly refusing to cut the film down. I got so fed up with not being able to see this, since there’s now also a TV series based on the work, that I finally got around to importing a Blu Ray release of this thing.

And, yeah, it’s not a bad film. It’s a nice 1950s style sci-fi novel concept (as modern sci-fi often is) although the whole thing feels a little bit dated to me in terms of the film reminding me of a lot of stuff I was seeing from places like Korea in the 1990s. That is to say, the film is kinda complex in terms of the amount of detail crammed into the thing... it made me think of some live action manga adaptations from the end of the last millennium.

The plot is of a post-apocalyptic Earth where nobody can survive (after mankind absolutely doomed themselves by bringing in the ‘big freeze’) unless they are in this specific, very long train which keeps moving and circling the planet on one large track over the course of a year... so, for example, you will always know from the wreckage of the place you are passing again when it is New Year’s Day. Stay on the constantly moving and self sufficient train and you live... exit and you freeze to death within minutes.

However, there is a class system established on the train, from the rich folk at the front, down to the lower classes at the rear who are more or less treated like prisoners in Nazi Germany and it’s here where our main protagonists work together to throw off the chains of their oppressors. The story tells of a group of characters played by the likes of Chris Evans, Kang-ho Song, Jamie Bell, Ko Asung, Octavia Spencer, Ewan Bremner and John Hurt as they finally organise themselves enough to try and fight their way to the front of the train and seize control of their situation. In their path, a whole host of bad guys and henchmen including Tilda Swinton, playing her evil character as kind of a Northern shop steward and the man at the top, Ed Harris.

And so, yeah, if this sounds all very like the original intended version of the late Bruce Lee’s Game Of Death, where his character was supposed to fight his way level by level up the tower... this is exactly what we have here. Except the tower is vertical, moving very fast and much longer. Plus there’s no kung fu action, of course.

As you can imagine from a cast as good as this, all the performances in this are superb (and it’s very grim too, because of it) but it’s the constant changes in interior locations and the inventiveness of different settings which continue to hold the interest as the story progresses. The first three quarters of an hour or more, for example, are really dark and grey and exactly the kind of colour palette you’d imagine for depicting a Jewish ghetto in a film set during the Second World War but, as new sections of the train are unlocked and revealed to the constantly diminishing band of survivors, everything gets more brighter and, of course more decadent as things go on, with the various ruling classes juxtaposed with our ‘low life heroes’ from the back of the train.

There’s a beautiful, breathtaking aquarium environment, for example, where the walls of one carriage are completely lined with aquatic life so the rest of the train can have sushi during certain times of the year. There’s a school room with kids and a somewhat irritating, singing teacher and even some ‘clubbing’ quarters where dancing, drinking and drugs is going on.

There’s lots of fighting going on too and it’s interesting how director Ho manages to get you to feel the emotional weight of some of the deaths when you’ve really only known certain characters for a half an hour. One interesting fight scene is where the incredibly long train is turning around on a huge u-turn of track, allowing a sniper to fire in a gun battle between two carriages while they are in view of each other. This was a nice touch and I have to wonder if this was in the original comic or if someone thought of this visual possibility purely for the film.

Adding to both this emotional weight and the gravitas of some of the action scenes is Marco Beltrami’s excellent score (I need to put this one on order soon). I was especially taken with a ‘call to action’ around halfway through the film where the underlying rhythm of the piece echoes, or actually creates, the sound of the locomotion of the transport. Very nicely done.

Okay, short review then because I’ve not got a whole lot more to say about Snowpiercer other than the fact that there’s a nice kind of twist as to where the narrative is going which you might suspect is coming at some point if you keep your eye on Ho’s regular actor Kang-ho Song... but may not realise is an option until this character starts offering up some science about their situation. It’s an okay ending but doesn’t neccessarily answer anything unless you are able to assume there’s a little more to what you are seeing than you have been shown... at least in terms of the aftermath of the film’s denouement. Not as good as The Host (which also stars Kang-ho Song and Ko Asung) but, at least for me, a solid science fiction vehicle with an interesting premise. 

*Wrote this a few months ago... it’s coming out over here in the on Blu Ray very soon.

Parasite

Parasite Lost

Parasite
2019 USA Directed by Bong Joon Ho
UK cinema release print.
I really loved Bong Joon Ho’s giant monster movie The Host back in 2006 but that’s the only movie I’ve previously seen by this director (okay, I have a Blu Ray of his post-apolcalyptic sci fi thriller Snowpiercer on order so expect a review of that one sometime this year). I was therefore initially very interested in seeing his new movie with the title Parasite, which I assumed from the title was returning to similar territory as The Host. So when I went to see this at the cinema I went in totally blind. I didn’t catch a trailer and knew pretty much nothing about it.

My first rumblings that this possibly might be a disappointment was when it won both the the Best Foreign Picture and Best Picture double at the Oscars. I really hate awards ceremonies, especially the Oscars but, they have had a few decent picks in the last ten years, occasionally awarding, perhaps more by luck than anything like effective critical judgement, some truly deserving films such as The Shape Of Water, Spotlight and Birdman. For the most part, though, the Oscars tend to award well made pieces of mediocrity with not much thinking required from the audience. When my friend Chris phoned me and told me Parasite was not half as clever as it thinks it is... it kinda set me up for there to be some kind of twist ending... he obviously didn’t like the film all that much and he’s usually all into the kinds of films that win those kinds of awards.

Alas, Parasite falls well into the “well made pieces of mediocrity with not much thinking required” category of movie. That’s not to say it’s a bad film... just kinda unremarkable which, for me, can sometimes be worse (because I can enjoy the odd bad movie more than a bland one). Also, I don’t know where the idea that it has any kind of surprises or twist endings comes from because, frankly, there are absolutely no surprises or even dramatic reveals that I could find in this film. It pretty much telegraphs itself from the start and almost, with the music in certain sections, announces itself long before something is going to happen.

But lets concentrate on the good stuff. Great acting from a cast of people with familiar faces, some of them who have worked with the director previously on films like as The Host, such as the ‘poor family father’ played by Kim Ki-taek and some really great direction. This is a well made movie, no doubt about it... just as The Host was. There are some beautiful shot designs too and I especially liked when the ‘poor family son’ approached the gate of his future employer’s house for the first time... the door and all the surrounding areas are made up of a plethora of vertical strips which he places the actor in and then, when the gate opens for him, he is framed against yet another vertical strip. So stuff like this is nice.

On the down side, the parasites in the movie... which are actually pretty much all the adults in the film, rich and poor alike (especially the rich)... are unable to recognise the difference in each other’s situations and this film is pretty much just about the class divides and the antagonism this creates. Which to me was just baffling as something worthy of exploration to this degree these days. It’s a given that there are horrible, unending divides created by affluence and poverty and nobody likes it but... I dunno, why are we still talking about this? It exists and honestly is not something we’ll be able to change unless we reach a proper money-less (not the same as cashless) society. So I found it kinda disappointing that someone who is obviously a highly skilled and artistically creative director such as Bong Joon Ho is making light weight Oscar-bait such as this.

Now, I did recognise a couple of strong similarities to The Host but, since I’ve only seen that one film other than this by this writer/director, I’m not sure if these are signatures or just coincidences.

‘Thing one’ was the introduction of archery into the story. Only minor in this but the bows and arrows of the ‘rich son’ were definitely something the director chose to focus on... and archery was, of course, a major character set up for a finale piece in The Host.

The other thing is the writer’s clear penchant for showing us the strength of the family unit. It was the underlying and certainly not subtle strength of the family in The Host and it’s certainly a dominant theme which comes across in all the families depicted in this movie. The way the family unit will work together in total harmony to achieve their goals is something which is a definite theme in these two movies and I am interested in seeing if this idea is pushed in any of the director’s other works.

And that’s me just about done on Parasite. This is a well oiled machine that is ultimately an elevated piece of fluff which doesn’t require you to think at all... just like the Oscar voters tend to like, it seems to me. Strong acting, direction throughout and I even liked the soundtrack, even if it is complicit in taking away any surprise from the story... it’s just overall never really a great movie, just a nicely put together one. In fact, it gets a bit dull at times, it has to be said. Not something I’d ever need to see again (whereas I could probably watch The Host every ten years or so). If you want to go see a well made film at the cinema then this is certainly something you should consider... just don’t go expecting to be surprised.