Revue 'Mickey 17': Bong Joon Ho returns with recycled ideas

Of course Bong Joon Ho is an environmentalist. He recycles his own ideas.

“Mickey 17”, a sloppy but pleasant science fiction comedy taking place in 2054, masks the monsterphobia of “The host” “ Activism of animal rights of “Okja,” the renunciation of the environment of “Snowpiercer” and the social inequality of “Parasite,” The latter the winner of the Oscars who gave Bong the white check to make a combo set of his greatest successes. It is the equivalent of the lunch plateau that Mickey 17 (Robert Pattinson) Gobbles in his cafeteria with outdoor space: the squares of the same nutritional filth. But I don't complain. Some filmmakers deliver sermons; Bong serves entertainment.

The 17th Mickey is a photocopy of flesh from Mickey Barnes, a good dope good for nothing desperate to flee the earth after its flop macaroon company and its main investor threatens it with a chainsaw. The earth is not worth staying anyway. “It looks like this whole planet was fleeing something,” said Mickey, looking at a long line of budding migrants who are jostling to win a place on a escape ship heading towards the Niflheim iced planet. As freezing as it is, Niflheim does not seem worse than the storms of dust beating at home.

The problem is that Mickey has no competence. It is underqualified to pilot plans or direct scientific experiences or even the Gunk. Mickey is a moron. A sweet moron, but a moron nevertheless, which is obvious as soon as Pattinson begins to cringe banalities in a nasal panting that sounds as if he has never had enough oxygen to his brain. In Edward Ashton's original novel in 2022 “Mickey 7”, the character is an academic, an even darker punch line.

Mickey is therefore registered to be the “consumable” of the ship, a canary-meets-upst-tes-fuymom which continuously sacrifices his life in the service of the nascent colony. Someone has to taste the atmosphere in the atmosphere and toxins in the air. Someone has to die to develop vaccines. It is a 3D reprint on human demand, made from remains of waste. Rightly so, Pattinson tilts his shoulders and curls up his upper lip: an obedient laboratory rat.

The premise is not “Marmot day.” Mickey 17 remembers the pain of all the previous mickeys, the original at n ° 16. Among the unworthiness that a newly vulnerable Mickey suffers, each spring from a stammering printer and flops on the ground, abandoned. At each copy, he treated less like a person. One of the intelligent adjustments that Bong created in Ashton's book has become the character of a man in a passive store. It hurts apart but cannot think directly of what is to blame.

In the opening scene, Mickey is trapped at the bottom of a abyss who fell not to his destiny, but to the embarrassment of everyone. Cold and frightened, he looks at his supposed best friend, Timo (Steven Yeun), hoping for rescue. Timo size his injuries with the impassiveness of an insurance expert and abandons him to freeze.

“Have a nice death,” said Timo with casualness. Mickey shivers. “Yeah, no … we are cool.”

The Highfalutin parallel is to “Candid”, The classical novel of the 18th century on a naive that endures the horrors of civilization: chaos, selfishness, illness and destruction. The problems of 1759 are the same of 2054, with too many years between the two. Bong probably read Voltaire. But his film plays with a poppier crowd. Mickey's bowl haircut is straight out of “Dumb and Dumber.” His obtuse optimism makes him intergalactic Forrest Gump.

Inconceivated, women love it. Mickey has a girlfriend outside the league, Nasha (Naomi acka), which, when 17 takes too long to return to his room, turns out to be a little too eager for a replacement. The 18th Mickey, also played by Pattinson, is a more standard hero who is magically a brain behind his eyes. Pattinson has incredible physical control over the two knee cartoons of 17 -year -old coward and his identical opposite. (Nasha calls them “Sweet and Habanero”.) While Pattinson changes between the two, you can't help but think about how the old “Dusk” The form of Heartthrob has moved away from romantic tracks. You can practically imagine Pattinson experimenting with his own face in front of a mirror, determining what inclination of the jaw transforms him from the beautiful (Bla) to Neanderthal (Hourra).

Most people on the ship are variable degrees of toads to the overlords of the ship, a vain politician named Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Savvier, Ylfa (Collette tones), who corrects her husband when he drops the bad thing. Mandatory celibacy does not go well, a joke that springs from the novel note that the colonists did not have an intellectually stimulating hobby. (“Above all, we have struck,” writes Ashton.) Sex shtick is twinned with a noisy piano score that has the impression that it has hired a western – it does not work at all. But I liked to spot the details in the design of futuristic costumes that place the pimples and pockets in bizarre places.

Marshall is a pseudo -religious hypocritical which is realized against its enemies, both foreigners – the indigenous inhabitants of Niflheim, a kind of armadillo -esque nicknamed the “lianas” – and domestic, multiple as Mickey which he calls “the work of Satan”. Bong gave aspirations on television to the leader; The makeup team gave him Orange Tanner. You know the exercise before you even see his fans in the colony wearing red bullet caps and greeting with a single arm. Here is where I should note that the film wrapped the shooting in 2022. Bong had to play that the gag would be kitsch, if it was still exaggerated. Voltaire would have warned that history repeats itself, repeats itself and repeats itself.

Ruffalo has always struck me like a really decent man. Lately, he has invested this good will in game demons, like his nominated icar turn like the Lech in “Poor things.” He slips into these shells as if they were a rubber twz -kissing suit and go wild. As for Ylfa, a newly concocted character, it just exists to press a talent for colletal caliber and comic chops in the plot. His Ylfa is a Glamour gourmet – herself a photocopy of the terrible magnate of Tilda Swinton meat in “Okja”. Rhapsodly on condiments to a hungry workers' ship, Ylfa can as well be drinking, “Let them eat ketchup!”

The last section of the film lights up as it moves away from Mickey's script, Bong Changes Gears towards his favorite subject: the uprisings. The feeling that Bong made this film before led him to take lazy shortcuts. A secondary intrigue implies a second spin-off “Okja”, one thing of Roly-Poly-Mammali that we are supposed to find adorable simply because it is there. Of course, it's small, whatever. The design of the creature is similar to a microscopic late, which gives it enough biological credibility to balance that it also has the same tentacle mouths which take place as all the other extraterrestrials of the last 15 years.

More interesting is that the animals seem to be linked en masse – their society shares an empathy that lacks humanity. Not a creepper seems to doubt that others have a soul. We cannot say the same thing with a right face, with or without tentacle mouths. As semi-sensitive as “Mickey 17” feels in the Bong cannon, I am at peace that he continues to ask how to give the value of everyone's life. He will continue to repeat the question until we offer an answer.