Mickey 17: Pattinson denies in the heart of a mixture of virtuoso genres (critic)
The last SF fable of the director of Parasite dissects with a humor creaking the excesses of our consumer society. Be careful, it shakes.
Imagine for a moment that death is just a simple bureaucratic glitch, a setback set in a few hours of 3D printing. It is the exciting beginnings of Mickey 17new film by Bong Joon-Ho in which he dynamites the codes of the SF to deliver a freezing reflection on our relationship to life and death. The Korean filmmaker, in perpetual balance between social satire and big Hollywood spectacle, has visibly found in this story of clone dispensable the ideal playground to push his singular vision in his last entrenchments.
On the icy planet Niflheim, the “Expendables” like Mickey are the last link in a perfectly oiled operating chain: human scouts sent in recognition, reprinted after each death to continue their mission. This beginning could be only an additional dystopian style exercise, but in the hands of Bong, it becomes a political fable of a fairly enjoyable ferocity. Robert Pattinsonimpressive of precision, therefore embodies 18 different versions of the character, juggling between the pathetic and the sublime, the grotesque and the frightening, the neuneu or the Machiavellian – but always with a confusing mastery.
It is he who by a simple rise of eyebrow or a change of tone makes the gender film in genre. But if the actor thus seems to the controls, we are well with the author of Parasite. And as in SnowpiecerBong uses the framework of science fiction to deploy a literally hardcore social criticism. The metaphor is clear: Mickey is the archetype of the worker sacrificed on the altar of profit, his literally consumable body serves the interests of a faceless corporation. It goes even further, since the film flirts with reflection on identity and memory …
Mickey 17 Strikes by its balance between existential horror and black humor. The scenes where the hero questions the nature of his own existence alternate with burlesque sequences worthy of Dr. FOLAMOUR. Mark Ruffalo, as a politician demagogue with Trumpian accents, embodies this grotesque dimension with an obvious delight and thanks to its all crazy actors, the permanent oscillation between the registers, a trademark of the filmmaker since The Hostreaches heights of virtuosity here.
Served by the spectacular photography of Darius Khondji, the realization plays constantly on contrasts. The sanitized spaces of the spatial base oppose the organic brutality of Niflheim, while the very process of “reprint” of Mickey is filmed with an almost documentary precision which underlines its absurdity. Bong refuses the temptation of a clinical and disembodied sf, anchoring his story in a disturbing corporality – the mickey are dirty, they sweat, bleed, decompose and even fuck.
By choosing to represent cloning as a process as trivial as an inkjet impression, Bong desecrates transhumanism and the question of immortality. It is in this tension between the sublime of the issues and the baseness of the means that the film finds its subversive force. Mickey 17 is not so much a film on the future as an allegory of the present, where human life has become a variable of adjustment in the equation of profit.
By kissing the codes of the Hollywood blockbuster while subverting them from the inside, he may sign his most ambitious work to date. A success all the more remarkable as it is part of the system itself as it criticizes, proving that it is still possible to make a cinema of resistance in the heart of the Hollywood machine
By Bong Joon-Ho. With Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Mark Ruffalo… Duration 2h17. Released March 5, 2025
