Fascism fascination for gamers
Juvenile nihilism is Bong Joon-ho’s stock-in-trade. At age 55, the director of the vicious South Korean social satire Parasite specializes in adolescent appeal. He offers comic book, video game cynicism about the state of the world and possibilities of death, violence, and dystopia. So in Mickey 17, following up his Oscar wins for Parasite, Bong goes full-bore into nihilist humor.
His hero is Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), a hapless, high-voiced Millennial venture capitalist who in 2054 travels to a distant planet colony Niflheim where he’s hired as an “Expendable,” testing the environment’s inhabitability but standing for the nonessential anomie of today’s hopeless youth market.
Mickey dies multiple times and is comically replicated via 3-D digital printer. A plot twist involving female security agent Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who has sex with both Mickey 17 and 18, kills romance in favor of faithlessness. Bong’s rationalization is that quirky Mickey 17 opposes Mickey 18’s plans to assassinate Niflheim’s fascist developer, Kenneth Marshall, a lousy Trump impersonation by Mark Ruffalo, confirming the film’s predictably leftist political subtext.
Bong is interesting only for his bizarre, South Korean fascination with fascist threat — normalizing class revolt in Parasite and Snowpiercer, satirizing corporate tyranny in Okja and now Mickey 17, where slick, satirical sci-fi gimmickry sells paranoia to Gen Z filmgoers who, like Mickey, lack a moral foundation. Bong presumes they pursue pop culture to see their pessimism verified — an Oscar stunt that may work only once.
Decades ago, before 2054 and the annihilation of hope, politicized youth culture protested for humanism and against industrialization (Bob Seger’s 1978 song “Feel Like a Number”), but Bong uses Mickey to exploit digital-age anonymity. Pattinson, who favors anomic characters in Cosmopolis and The Batman, here plays a degraded Walter Mitty fantasy figure. Mickey 17’s sci-fi disaster comedy portrays the future of mankind’s dehumanization — call it The Wild Robot 17.
The political parallels in Mickey 17 are so obvious that they prove Bong is pandering to the secular biases that only silly teens will think is avant-garde. (Parasite could have been made by any American capable of Bong’s slickness — David Fincher or the two Daniels, Kwan and Schienert, who made Everything Everywhere All at Once.)
Bong’s South Korean version of Western snark and high-tech world-building has given him the reputation of a Kubrickian hipster. Mickey’s mortal lament “How did I survive that?” expresses Millennial skepticism. He’s betrayed by his friend Timo (Steven Yeung) who sneers, “What’s it feel like to die? I’m sure you’re used to it by now. But still . . .”
That “But still” is a perversion of the Buddhist concept of transcending death — what’s called “Bardo” when trendily borrowed from The Tibetan Book of the Dead’s period between death and rebirth; futuristic mankind cheats it through technological reincarnation. (Mickey is repeatedly reprinted with a new body, plus what he calls “memory transplanting and religious blah, blah, blah.”)
But there’s no spirituality in an expensive, lavish spectacle, replete with Peter Jackson–style goofy monsters. And Bong is the wrong pop artist to convey cultural dissent — as Kendrick Lamar did in his controversial Super Bowl Halftime Show that portrayed black Americans as video game figures resembling Mickey in his space suit and those contestants in Squid Game TV series.
Bong has adapted Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey 7 and upped the ante by ten, making disingenuous reference to biblical seriousness by setting the prophetic story on Planet Niflheim (referencing the Nephilim in the Old Testament), yet there’s a basic, goofy lack of seriousness. Consider Mickey 17 as merely a jaded version of Adam Sandler’s Spaceman, an existential sci-fi drama, which couldn’t reach kids who are no longer taught Kafka. Bong simplifies Kafka for gamers then adds sarcastic advice: Amuse yourself. Abuse yourself.