Director: Bong Joon-ho
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo
Rating: (M)
★★★★
REVIEWED BY AMASIO JUTEL
More Okja than Parasite, Mickey 17 (Reading, Rialto) announces Bong Joon-ho’s return to feature film-making six-years on from his paramount success at the Academy Awards in 2020.
It’s 2054, and Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is fleeing Earth after failing to repay a vengeful loan shark. Neglecting to read the contract nor look into the conditions of his interstellar work, Mickey signs up as an "Expendable", a cloned worker with lethal working conditions who is reprinted when he dies.
Pattinson has garnered a unique star persona post-Twilight and Harry Potter, demonstrating his desire to work with auteurs — the Safdie brothers, Claire Denis, Robert Eggers, Christopher Nolan and now Bong Joon-ho — and make big acting decisions, such as the wonderful vocal performance given here.
Attempting to form Earth’s first outer space colony, his crew’s mission to colonise the planet Niflheim is led by the teleological Trump/Musk amalgam figure, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), with great teeth and an all-too familiar cadence with his sauce-obsessed, Melania-coded wife Ylfa (Toni Colette), and a legion of red-cap wearing zealots.
It’s likely that the strong anti-capitalist themes could come off as grating to viewers inundated with enough Maga content in their everyday lives — a plot point made too timely by the year of delays suffered by this film — and might, if not for the strong environmental and intersectional musings on the "other", represented by the snowy planet’s "Creepers".
