Why Mickey 17 is polarizing audiences

After all the attention he received for his acclaimed film Parasite, many critics and audience members alike are curious about South Korean director Bong Joon Ho's latest film, Mickey 17. 

The dystopian dark comedy stars Robert Pattinson as the titular character Mickey, an "expendable" man who is employed by a space colony in the near-distant future. His job as an expendable, however, is to be sent out into dangerous scenarios and then "reprinted" (a process akin to regeneration or cloning) after his death, so that he can do it all over again in support of scientific progress.

The film's main antagonist is the head of the space expedition, Kenneth Marshall, played by Mark Ruffalo, and Naomi Ackie plays Mickey's love interest Nasha, a security agent in the colony. Over the course of the film, we watch Mickey undergo a series of gory deaths in order to colonize this ice planet — until one reprinting goes very wrong.

Today on Commotion, East Asian studies professor Michelle Cho and CBC Entertainment reporter Jackson Weaver join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to talk about how the anti-capitalist sci-fi allegory landed with them.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Jackson, what do you make of this movie?

Jackson: I love my man Bong Joon Ho, and I love what he's trying to do here. But here is my "deep state conspiracy theory" as it relates to this movie…. I think that there's so much in this movie that is interesting. But it's introduced, and dropped. Like there's this one part where we introduce Mickey and then his love interest Nasha. And they're shown to be kindred spirits because when Kenneth Marshall comes into the room, everyone claps except for those two. It shows that they're both kind of iconoclasts. Except there's another person in the background, this bald woman who very, very pointedly also does not clap, and you're like, "Oh, there must be a reason for that. Who is this woman? She's so interesting." Never see her again. She's never named. At the very end of the movie, in the background, she's seen as dating a secondary antagonist.

Which I think — deep state conspiracy theory — there was a whole other movie embedded in this movie. There's a four-and-a-half hour Bong Joon Ho cut. One of the reasons why this movie was delayed so many times — it was supposed to come out over a year ago — I think is because he presented this movie to the studio where it's so complex. Everything's finished. Everything makes sense. And they're like, "We cannot have this much. No one's going to see it. Cut as much as you can." And he compromised and cut a lot out to try and make it more acceptable, amenable to wider audiences. When you have, like, four different plot lines, and you cut 75 per cent of all of them, you don't end up with one whole movie. You end up with a whole mess. I kind of think that's what happened here.

Elamin: Okay, so Jackson's like, "Some of this is working, but maybe it would have been nice to see the full movie at work." Michelle, is that your experience of this movie?

Michelle: So, I had a blast. It was so entertaining. Jackson and I, I think, are really good representatives of the reaction this film is getting. It's very polarized, actually. I think that I like maximalist Bong, and so I'm willing to just go for the ride, and I'm not too concerned when things get dropped and stuff. But it's because I had fun the whole time, even though the three acts of this film kind of feel like they could all be separate movies. There's a disjointed quality to it, which is kind of wacky. I mean, it's truly the definition of zaniness in a lot of moments. And I mean, that's kind of Bong in this modality of making a film that stars well-known Hollywood actors and working in English….

He wants to surprise and push forms to their limits. Remember, Parasite felt like a movie that you knew until it turned into a totally different movie. But that worked. And so that is his signature in certain ways. It works better in [some] of his attempts than others, so I'll give him that for sure. And so I understand why a lot of people are critical of Mickey 17, because it's kind of too many things. It's like a bunch of rats trying to escape some sort of danger and run in many different directions. I think that that's also fun for a lot of it. And so yeah, I really loved it.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jean Kim.