Eventually they'll get that head right
dir: Bong Joon-Ho
2025
Multiple Robert Pattinsons = barely enough for some people. For me, one is too many depending on the film. He is an actor that I still can’t wrap my head around, but I have seen him put in some decent performances in the “right” movies, and some performances that make me grind my teeth to dust.
I think he’s okay in this flick, but that’s the thing when you get to play multiple versions of a character – law of averages eventually means you’ll get at least one of them right.
Set slightly in the future, as in, about twenty-five years from now, our planet is a climate wasteland ruled by corporate churches and billionaire morons. Having thoroughly fucked up this planet, the plan is to set up a colony on a planet they call Niflheim, after the Norse name for a frozen realm of ice, storms and dead souls. Clearly a paradise for all to behold.
In order to make the colonisation easier, late stage capitalism, even more ethically challenged than the version we currently have, allows for the creations of clones of people who die in perilous circumstances, ie. on a frozen planet. How best to test if there are lethal pathogens in the atmosphere, or whether radiation levels are fatal, or any other number of probable origins of death in all its glory? Well, you send out Mickey (Robert Pattinson), or do human testing on him in the lab, and through his multiple deaths you make scientific progress!
Out of a printer that looks like an MRI pops out another Mickey, with most of his memories intact, ready to be killed again in the service of this expedition lead by an even dumber and more terrible version of Trump, here called Marshall, and here played by Mark Ruffalo. Now Mark Ruffalo’s hatred of the orange emperor is well known and celebrated, but seeing and hearing it in this flick is not pleasant, not funny, and ultimately not helpful in telling this story. Hating a villain is hardly anything new in terms of storytelling, but playing this buffoon this way makes it harder to take this flick seriously, if at all.
Mickey17 is the latest in a long line of Mickeys, and he’s something of whiny loser, as was the original. I am not sure if he’s ‘simple’, or just not particularly bright, but he does a fuckload of narration in that voice, and it’s a pretty annoying voice. It kinda sounds like Woody Allen on helium, and that, paired with Pattinson’s young Brando-like dumb/handsome looks, makes him sound like he could drop the “I coulda been a contender if it hadn't been for my allergies” speech at a moment’s notice.
During the long journey out to Niflheim, despite being such a loser and dying so many times during the trip, he somehow snags himself a delightful girlfriend in the form of Nasha (Naomi Ackie, who’s great here and was so great in last year’s Blink Twice).
She is some kind of security guard / cop / agent, but most importantly, is really into all of the Mickeys, no matter what their number.
The science people who torment Mickeys and also oversee their re-printing are white-coated dispassionate types who don’t see any of the Mickeys as human, even though for all intents and purposes they are no different from any other people (other than, to borrow an acronym from the last season of The White Lotus, that Mickeys are LBHs, or ‘losers back home’).
Mickey and a truly hateful acquaintance called Timo (Stephen Yuen) who claims to be his friend without any evidence of such being true, run afoul of a loan shark and his minions which forced them to enter into this colonisation journey in order to avoid being carved up. Timo somehow bribed or glad-handed his way aboard, but they only took Mickey because he agreed to sign over his rights and become an Expendable, someone who can legally be killed and recreated endlessly. Timo finds every opportunity to make things worse for Mickey, and yet Mickey17, the one we spend most of our time with, doesn’t bare him any ill-will.
It’s also Timo who’s responsible when they break the one rule of cloning Expendables: having two Mickeys around at the same time, which could see both killed and Mickey’s code and memories deleted. He’s such a piece of shit he almost eclipses the Trump surrogate, almost but not quite.
Mickey18, despite being based on the same memories and genetic code, is not like Mickey17. He is angry, with justification, at how the Mickeys have been treated, and he yearns, like all decent people, to destroy Marshall and all that he stands for (which includes treating women as livestock, and with his dreams of creating an Aryan paradise on a pure pristine ‘white’ planet).
One little hiccup is that the planet already has at least one local species, one that Marshall calls the “creepers”, so everyone else calls them creepers as well. They are the ones that end up saving Mickey17’s life, and apparently not only are they not trying to kill all the humans (yet), they might be able to communicate with language and such like some kind of intelligent species.
The creatures mostly look like what I think we call slater bugs in Australia, but the rest of the world has a panoply of names for: Pill bugs, rolly-pollies, doodlebugs, woodlice, twiddle bugs, potato bugs, chiggy pigs, gramersows, the list is endless. The point is they don’t look that scary, but these creatures have leaders and an ability to communicate over great distances and, obviously, with the awful people in charge of the colonisation effort, the intention is to kill them all.
This might all sound like a tightly plotted flick, but there is a lot of slackness throughout. It takes a lot of time, and a lot of awful Marshall monologues (with constant asides from his appalling sidekick / wife Ylfa (Toni Collette)), and a lot of fucking around to get to the grand ending.
Mickey17 is (meant to be) a likeable dolt, but he’s pretty fucking annoying a lot of the time. When Mickey18 appears on the scene and they try to kill each other, from then on Mickey17’s main concern is that Mickey18 will get to have sex with Nasha, which Mickey17 jealously can’t handle.
And yet when Nasha sees the two of them together, the first and only thing she can think of is having sex with both of them at the same time. I mean, I have no doubt there are a stack of women and possibly a bunch of men who would think the same thing, but for me all I could think about when it stopped being that funny is how idiotically all of them were acting when they could all be killed for it, and yet never close a door or utter a restrained thought.
It might sound like the flick is all over the place tonally, and that would be right. I hesitate to call it a dark comedy because it doesn’t really feel that dark: it’s often pretty comedically silly, so it’s not really that grim at any stage. And of course hearing a Trump substitute do and say stupid and terrible things, and there being multiple opportunities for other characters to scream at that substitute and tell him what a stupid and awful person he is, and how he should have lost all those elections, because he’s a fucking idiot, it just took up space, oodles of space.
It’s also interesting, and I use the word advisedly, that the latter part of the flick pretty much rips off about half of the Miyazaki animated flick Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which I don’t really mind, because there’s nothing wrong with being reminded of such a good film, but I wonder whether all that creative effort coming up with terrible jokes peppered through the flick (like why is that guy wearing a pigeon suit for four years?) meant they had nothing left in the tank for the last part of the movie.
Legendary South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho has made a bunch of great movies over the years. I don’t need to spruik his talents at all. My point is he’s already made a better version of this story, and it was called Snowpiercer. That satirised capitalism’s endless drive to consume everything including people in the pursuit of something arbitrary, but did so in a brutal and more streamlined fashion.
This flick has a different sensibility, and traffics in lazy satire that will only seem more dated as time passes. When the orange turd making life hell for millions of Americans and for many more around the world dies, yes there will be sad morons who no longer have their emperor to worship, but there will be other grateful billions who will breath out a collective sigh of relief so loud that it will be heard on other planets. When that happens I don’t imagine myself popping Mickey17 into the Blu-Ray player in order to relieve the ‘greatest’ parodies of the shithead’s time soiling our consciousness with his awfulness.
If it’s not a fair or decent approximation of the book that it’s based on, being Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, I’ll never know because I’m unlikely to read it now, but I would be amazed if they make a movie version of the sequel, Antimatter Blues, well, for lots of reasons, mostly to do with this flick’s failure at the box office.
I don’t want to sound endlessly negative about the flick, because I think it won me over by the end, mostly, even though I didn’t really get what they were doing with the religious stuff, even though I hated the pseudo-Trump stuff. And that’s mostly from strength of the performances, especially the way Pattinson plays Mickey18, who is rendered more fearsome even than the way he played the ‘hero’ in The Batman.
The cinematography and the set design are really strong as well, which certainly helps. If the film ultimately has a stronger point than cloning and colonisation being bad, I haven’t been able to discern it as yet, but maybe it will come to me on a future viewing.
6 times I’m really hanging out to see what Mickey19 is like out of 10
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“Hey!... I'm still good meat! I'm perfectly good meat! I taste fine!” – if you say so, champ - Mickey17
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