There exists an almost certainly apocryphal myth that Barack Obama’s ribald comments about Donald Trump at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner were responsible for spurring him to victory.
It is equally fanciful to argue that, with this fitful science-fiction satire, Bong Joon Ho belatedly kicks back at Trump for slagging off the director’s Oscar win for Parasite in 2020.
But let’s have fun with it anyway. “We’ve got enough problems with South Korea, with trade,” Trump said. “On top of it, they give them the best movie of the year. Was it good? I don’t know.”
Bet he’s regretting that now. Bong denies that any characters here are based on real-life personalities, but, golly, there is a lump of Trump in Mark Ruffalo’s hammy take on the egomaniacal Kenneth Marshall. The cuboid-headed politician-cum-space-tycoon – yes, there is a bit of Elon Musk too – has the same oafish swagger and prissy hand gestures.
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Ruffalo is also ill-advisedly attempting an impersonation of the Orange Emperor’s vocal tics. It’s appallingly broad and embarrassingly unamusing, somewhere between undergraduate agitprop and how a president might appear on SpongeBob SquarePants.
The bit also feels dated. The follow-up to Parasite shot in the summer of 2022 and has been juggled about the schedules ever since. (At least one actor has since died.) The gag about Marshall losing elections doesn’t land as it might have done if, as once planned, Mickey 17 had arrived a full year ago.
Then again, none of the satire here has time for nuance. We are, for most of the duration, on a distant planet where a class of wriggly, many-legged beast stands in for both the buffalo and the American Indian. “We’re the aliens,” someone unnecessarily tells Marshall.
Toni Collette is, if anything, less subtle as his wife, a vulgar harridan puzzlingly obsessed with “sauce” (one of many elements lost in translation?).
All of this irritating background noise gets in the way of a core story that fulfils some of its potential. We start with the always welcome Robert Pattinson facing apparently imminent death on the remote ice planet.
Oddly, this is not quite an existential crisis. We learn that he has signed up to be an “expendable”, a low-grade worker who can be regenerated if needs must. Against the odds, Mickey 17, so named because he is the 17th incarnation of renegade Mickey Barnes, survives and staggers home to find that his sinister bosses have already created a Mickey 18. Mayhem ensues.
The vast banks of voiceover from Pattinson suggest the film-makers know they have too much story to cram into the not-inconsiderable running time. Motivations go missing. Cheeky erotic potentials are flung away.
Yet the strong cast does make something fleetingly diverting of this jumbled concoction.
Pattinson adopts a timbre close to Jerry Lewis’s New Jersey twang for the befuddled Mickey 17 and a sleeker drawl for the more confident Mickey 18.
Anamaria Vartolomei, clever, sly, and Naomi Ackie, fiery, vocal, both pop off the screen in significant supporting roles. Darius Khondji, renowned cinematographer, softens the image to create hints of menace both on the planet and in the spaceship.
For all that good work, however, Mickey 17, adapted from a novel by Edward Ashton, feels like a rickety compromise bolted together from incompatible parts.
Bong remains one of the era’s singular film-makers, but, after Korean classics such as Memories of Murder, Mother and, of course, Parasite, he continues to stumble when shooting in another tongue.
Snowpiercer, from 2013, and Okja, from 2017, have their fans. Mickey 17 will also gather a cult. None of those English-language titles will, however, rate close to his best work.
In cinemas from Friday, March 7th
