The relationship between a work of art and its audience is a special one. It can be intimate, tender, and authentic, or it can be volatile, invasive, and upsetting. But when you give yourself over to a film, truly meet it on its own frequency, and surrender yourself to the viewing experience wholeheartedly, that film is destined to change you in some way. It may be something as simple as altering your mood or sending you out of the darkness of the cinema theater into the light of normalcy with a bit of an extra bounce in your step. Simultaneously, the relationship does go both ways. A work of art is set, solid, no longer fluid, an objective fixture in many ways. And yet, what we bring to it as viewers often changes our perception of the film.
As I write this, one of the men who has spent the last several weeks actively dismantling American democracy and dragging the country to the brink of oligarchy and outright fascism, Elon Musk, has just gone on the single most popular podcast in the country and proclaimed that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
Considering that the late, great Roger Ebert once referred to the medium of cinema as “a machine that generates empathy,” I personally couldn’t help but weigh these recent derogatory and outright vile political comments against the state of modern cinema. For example, the fact that mere hours after Musk’s comments were released to the public, the Academy Awards bestowed Best Picture to Sean Baker’s Anora, the latest and best work of one of the most singularly empathetic filmmakers in modern film, feels worth remarking upon. Empathy is not just necessary; it is outright vital, and anyone who’s trying to tell you otherwise is acting with nefarious intent. Films that foster that sense of empathy, that actively engage with characters who are living in alternate worlds from our own, either literally or figuratively, are to be applauded and championed because they are vital to the very ideals of righteousness, coexistence, and happiness on this planet.
Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 is a profoundly empathetic film that is almost entirely about this very crusade. In a world in which the loudest and more corrosive of voices are given precedence, and the hardworking laborers are treated as little more than expendable cogs in an industrial machine, Mickey 17 finds the beauty and individuality within each soul. While it was filmed in 2022, in so many ways, Bong Joon-ho’s latest film does feel like the first bona fide post-Trump 2.0 cinematic commentary, and because of this, its purity and unmistakable earnestness come across all the more viscerally.
All of this should come as no real surprise, given that Bong Joon-ho has been in the business of making phenomenal films for decades. From Memories of Murder to The Host to Snowpiercer to Okja to his own Best Picture-winning Parasite, Bong makes thematically saturated films that are executed with meticulous precision and are often full of unmistakable pathos. The lens through which to best view Mickey 17 is not so much as this brilliant filmmaker’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning masterpiece but rather as a new addition to his catalog that can bump against those other works and maybe even alter your perceptions of them.
Starring Robert Pattinson in a cavalcade of roles (he plays a total of eighteen different characters throughout the film, though the lion’s share of screentime is distributed between two primary versions), Mickey 17 sees Bong taking the core conceit of Ashton Edward’s source material novel and running with it to deliver a blatant, sentimental, heart-on-its-sleeve plea for humanity to realize the insurmountable worth of valuing the lives of the people and creatures you’re living alongside of. As a result, I found the film to be funny, sweet, charming, and compelling in equal measure. Pattinson is delivering fantastically sculpted work on every front, with the chasm of range he’s able to bring to the two most prominent iterations of Mickey being mesmerizing. The screenplay, credited solely to Bong himself, is deceptively complex, betraying the air of a far simpler, almost fable-esque tale, but actually working in far more nuanced ways to distill further meaning from the form and content of the writing itself. For example, many a far-flung science-fiction film before Mickey 17 has opened with a fair bit of voiceover narration from the protagonist of the film, quickly throwing a whole lot of exposition at the audience to catch them up on precisely what kind of world they’re entering into. But few, if any, have ever utilized the artifice of the narration itself in such a distinctly pointed fashion, as Bong takes the opportunity to not only indebt us emotionally to Pattinson’s character but also to sew seeds of distrust in the authority of the viewpoint itself in ways that bleed over into the core themes of the film in fascinating ways by the story’s end.
Visually, shot by cinematographer Darius Khondji (who worked on Se7en, Okja, and Uncut Gems just to namedrop a few stone-cold classics) Mickey 17 looks immaculate. Bong’s camerawork is as assured and visually arresting as ever, and the way in which he’s able to incorporate automated camera moves into the multi-pronged performance style the roles necessitated for Pattinson is enthralling to watch unfold. This pairs extremely well with Fiona Crombie’s production design and Yang Jin-mo’s editing (both of whom did remarkable work on Bong’s Parasite as well) to form this fully immersive world, which the audience is only viewing through a very distinct, very motivated window. While there is often an immense sense of size and scale to the action unfolding within the film, the visual language of the piece is often invasively intimate, with Bong and co. never allowing the grandeur of the story to supersede the very fallible, very frail human characters at its center.
Other wonderful performances are peppered throughout the film, with the likes of Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo all getting in on the action and sinking their teeth into this gonzo world that Bong has forged. The score by Jung Jae-il is phenomenal and made all the more effective through its sparing use. So much of the musical work here feels directly tied to the kinds of classical compositions that Charlie Chaplin himself would arrange for his own films and thematically ties Pattinson’s own titular downtrodden tramp to those of cinema’s past in striking ways.
Having said all of that, I don’t think Mickey 17 is going to work for everyone. It’s a very distinct, singular work. Even for as much kinship as there is between this film and Bong’s other works, there’s a fairly large leap in terms of the kinds of overt satirization and sentimentality on display here. For me personally, the film felt tonally like it landed somewhere between the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona (with a late title card drop to match) and Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, and I adored that about it. This unique tonality was, again, only further aided by Pattinson’s central performances, which are so keenly tapped into precisely what Bong is putting down that it anchors the whole thing in impressive ways.
RGM GRADE
(A-)
Mickey 17 may not have been made as a call to arms for the artists, writers, and poets of the world suffering through the indignities of these hyper-modern political times, but it sure as fuck functions as one. It is the kind of film whose prescience is occasionally outright shocking despite the fact that Bong is mining his material from centuries past. The more things change, the more they stay the same I suppose, but with Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho and co. have crafted an unflinching love letter to unabashed empathy in the face of gluttonous capitalism, and it fucking rules.
