This is the perfect return of ‘gen director Bong Joon-ho.

Despite his collaboration with Warner Bros., a massive Hollywood film company, Director Bong Joon-ho‘s signature humor and solid sense of theme are firmly ingrained in his work. A satire disguised as SF, not a SF blockbuster, but an original SF black comedy. This is ‘Mickey 17’, a completely new SF film like you’ve never seen before.

‘Mickey 17’ is about Mickey (Robert Pattinson), who owes a lot of money on Earth, boarding a spaceship to pioneer an ice planet led by Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a powerful politician, and working as the Expendables. The Expendables, who take on dangerous tasks, are a kind of consumable that can print their bodies and come back to life even after losing their lives.

At first glance, these settings, such as pioneering new planets, seem no different from many existing SF films. The setting of the Expendables (consumables) being ‘reprinted’ is also reminiscent of director Duncan Jones‘ 2009 film ‘Moon’, which dealt with the labor of cloned humans, or the SF classic ‘Blade Runner’, which closely dealt with the dilemma of replicas.

But that’s all. After the beginning that kindly explains the settings, such as clones and pioneering planets, and the moment the 17th Mickey encounters the 18th Mickey who was printed even though he didn‘t die, the film unfolds its own unique story, as if it has no interest in the huge genre of SF. It’s almost indifferent to the vast universe and spectacular scale that Hollywood SF movies focus on. The movie finally begins to sharply delve into the story that Director Bong really wanted to tell, the story that Director Bong has always dealt with since his debut: ‘Humans and Class’.

The class issue is also clearly revealed in the positions and occupations of the main characters. The contrast between Mickey, an extreme blue-collar worker who risks his life working in the field, and Marshall, the leader of the ice planet pioneer group who employs and commands Mickey, is similar to the rich and poor families in ‘Parasite’, or the tail and head cars in ‘Snowpiercer’. In particular, Mickey‘s setting, who opened a macaron shop in an attempt to live well but went bankrupt and ended up in deep debt, seems like an extension of the Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) family in ‘Parasite’, who opened a giant castella shop but went bankrupt.

In particular, in this film, Director Bong goes beyond class and capitalism to include sharp satire on nationalism and colonialism, unfolding a much broader story on the screen than his previous work. Mickey’s sacrifice, like a ‘lab rat’, in the name of protecting the future of the pioneer group, and being forced into toxic gas and violent situations, brings to mind the inhumane biological experiments that imperialist countries conducted on their colonies in the past.

In addition, Marshall‘s appearance of saying that we should select the ’best genes‘ and spread perfect humanity on the new planet, is reminiscent of Hitler, who believed that only the Germanic race was noble and operated a baby factory called ’Lebensraum‘ of Germanic blood. The actions of those in power, who arbitrarily named the alien life forms that originally lived on the ice planet ’Creepers‘ (meaning ’strange‘) and then tried to drive them out of the planet, defining them as uncivilized, seem to represent many imperialist countries in the past, including the United States, which rose up by trampling on the Indians of the Americas.

‘Mickey 17’ deals with the various dark sides of humanity and history, but it is a work that fully displays Director Bong’s unique strength of never losing humor. The so-called ‘aesthetics of the slapstick’ of Bong Joon-ho, which has become a genre in which the protagonists must solve the case smoothly and lose the center of gravity at a critical moment, also shines.


Reporter Seungmi Lee smlee@donga.com

This article is automatically translated using Google AI. If you notice any inaccuracies, please let us know at allkstar@donga.com.