“Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho’s newest film, “Mickey 17,” opened in the United States on March 7. Despite a few misfires and the public’s lack of interest, the film is an entertaining watch.
“Parasite,” Bong’s previous film, is the highest-grossing South Korean film of all time, the first South Korean film to win a Palme d’Or and the first non-English film to win best picture at the Academy Awards. It also won best original screenplay, best director and best international feature film that year. Following this, expectations were understandably high for Bong’s next film. However, according to Yahoo Entertainment, “Mickey 17” grossed only $19 million during its domestic opening against an estimated $120 million production budget and is expected to lose $100 million.
Bong has proven that he can make good and profitable movies. Its $100 million budget gives “Mickey 17” an objectively higher production quality than prior efforts to create something similar, like the overly ambitious “Snowpiercer.” The real question that arises from this box office bomb is not whether Bong is a good director or a big budget is preferable to a smaller one — it is whether a big budget is compatible with Bong’s class-conscious philosophy and if attempts to make the film more accessible make it just kind of alright.
That is not to say that “Mickey 17” is a bad watch. The movie’s plot, adapted from the 2022 novel “Mickey7” by Edward Ashton, keeps viewers invested and makes its two-hour, 17-minute runtime pass quickly. The idea of an Expendable is particularly compelling. In the film, an Expendable is someone who agrees to have their genetic data copied so that they can die and be ‘reprinted’ indefinitely. Mickey (Robert Pattinson), the only Expendable the audience sees, is assigned to dangerous tasks to absorb the risk associated with them and increase the ship’s overall chances of survival as they try to colonize an unexplored planet.
However, Mickey’s shipmates take things a step too far. They continuously leave him to die when he doesn’t need to and treat him as less than human, despite his sacrifice. Though he only signed on because he was trying to escape debt collectors, couldn’t afford the expedition otherwise and didn’t fully understand what he was signing up for, this doesn’t change the fact that every death feels like death. Bringing to mind indentured servitude, the idea of the common good and what it means to live and die in an age of cloning, “Mickey 17’s” worldbuilding is provocative.
Additionally, Pattinson’s performance is compelling. How convincingly he plays two completely different personalities in Mickey 17, the 17th Mickey, and Mickey 18, the 18th Mickey, is one of the film’s high points. However, the fact that the sharp and nonchalant Mickey 18 came from the same genetic data as the childish and uncomposed Mickey 17 is confusing, especially when all of the prior Mickeys seemed similar to Mickey 17. It could have been caused by Mickey 18 being the first Multiple — the first Mickey to be printed while another Mickey was still alive. But this variation not being explained at all is distracting.
Another misfire was the film’s use of the minor character Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei). Like Mickey’s partner, Nasha (Naomi Ackie), Kai is one of the ship’s security agents. She initially comes across as an unflinching soldier who draws power from her belief she is doing the right thing — falling into that Captain America archetype. Upon her implied girlfriend Jennifer Chilton’s death and odd actions by the Trump-like Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), Kai seems to grow disillusioned with how things operate on their ship.
The institutional power that Kai possesses makes her appear to be a promising ally for Mickey 17. Instead, she falls for him in a weird, irrational way. After an odd scene in which she and Nasha argue over who gets to keep each Mickey, Kai isn’t seen again until the movie’s outro. The fact that she wasn’t utilized in the film’s entire last hour seems like an oversight, and her inclusion at the end reads as a token gesture.
Another point of contention is how heavy-handedly politician and mission leader Kenneth Marshall appears to satirize Donald Trump. If the voice somehow wasn’t enough, Ruffalo’s character was described in an official interview with Jimmy Fallon as a “Trump-inspired dictator role.”
With how comically bad Ruffalo’s Marshall is made out to be, one begins to question how realistic or nuanced the portrayal is. This makes the movie’s social critiques lose some of their real-life translatability and weight. Bong might have wanted to make the comparison obvious to appeal to more people, just as he is now backtracking on it. However, this dumbing down arguably makes it less appealing to everyone — people don’t like to be treated like they’re stupid.
There is simply too much money involved in a $100 million film for Bong to have free rein with his messaging. The financial pressures and need to consider outside perspectives could have contributed to the narrative misfires unrelated to politics. At the same time, Bong needs these kinds of budgets to produce science fiction films — his apparent inclination — at the quality expected of him.
However, Bong can’t have his cake and eat it too, even if he has had many types of cakes before. To do everything is to do nothing, as proved by the film’s bomb at the box office. Thus, Bong must be more intentional with what he wants out of his next film — massive worldbuilding, provocative social commentary or something else?
June Min is a 2024-2025 Assistant Arts & Entertainment Editor. He can be reached at junehm@uci.edu.
Edited by Lillian Dunn and Jaheem Conley.