2025, Bong Joon Ho (Memories of Murder) -- download
So much so, I am doing something I never did before (but not for any good reason) and I am now currently "listening to" the audiobook of "Mickey 7" by Edward Ashton on Spotify. It says 9 hours, which sounds like a lot, but considering it takes me MONTHS to read any book (snail pace reading + only during transit) this is not so bad. Still dealing with snobby "listening isn't reading" intrusive thoughts.
Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson, The Batman) is an "expendable". Its a job title more than anything. But its also a statement of lifestyle choice. Doing a spin-off of the "teletransportation paradox" (think that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Second Chances" where Riker is "doubled" by a transporter accident), Mickey is assigned to a colonization ship with the duty of ... being killed, after which he is printed out and uploaded with the consciousness from the last time he backed-up. If they need someone to do something that will most definitely get them killed, such as being exposed to fatal diseases in the atmosphere of a new planet, so they can come up with a vaccine, then he is the guy.
Mickey ends up with this job because: A) he is desperate to get away from a loan shark he owes money to, and B) he's a bit dim. Despite the astonishment and light discouragement from the recruiter (Holliday Grainger, Strike; <rawr>), Mickey signs up because it will get him a berth on the next colony ship leaving Earth. The dim part doesn't allow him to really conceive how exactly nasty this job will be to him.
And it doesn't help that the planet they arrive at (Niflheim) is a frozen ice ball with no plant life, and in fact, no animal life beyond a nasty pill bug that the colonists call a "creeper". When Mickey is sent out to capture one of these bugs, he falls into an ice crevasse and .... well, left for dead. His "best friend" Timo (Steven Yeun, Nope) should rescue him but doesn't consider it worth the effort. And just when Mickey thinks he is about to be eaten by the biggest creeper he has ever seen, it actually rescues him. Buuuuut Timo has returned to the ship and having reported Mickey (17th iteration) dead, they have printed out Mickey 18. Nobody knows, not even Mickey(s) until 17 shows up to his room and finds 18 in his bed.
And that is the crux of the movie. Mickey(s) are now "multiples" which are not looked upon favourably by the colonists. So, what will they do? How will the rest of the colonists handle it? How will Mickey's girlfriend Nasha (Naomie Ackie, Master of None) handle it? The answer, as expected, is not well.
The movie is a satirical dark comedy which I could not help but continually, internally, compare to The 5th Element. Head canon could allow me to think its the same universe, just different time periods. There are lots of Big Characters, caricatures of people. There is Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things), the leader of the colony ship, who is a washed-up politician and pseudo-religious leader with big hair, and bigger teeth that he seems to have issues looking past. And his wife Ylfa (Toni Collete, Knives Out), who wants nothing more than to turn creepers into sauce. Mickey himself is goofy looking with a yokel accent and perpetually sadsack look about him. The supporting cast look like they just walked off the set of the aforementioned Luc Besson movie, which is not entirely unsurprising, considering Bong obviously has a fondness for French comic-booky movies considering his first English language movie, Snowpiercer, was an adaptation of the French comic "Le Transperceneige".
I liked this movie enough to regret not seeing it in the cinema, but ... something is still nagging at me. I guess by the time we got past all the exposition about Mickey and his deaths, I was wondering where they were going to go with the story, and the focus on dealing with the creepers pretty much dominated the third act, and ... didn't interest me all that much. I might have a recurring theme with Bong Joon Ho in all the movies of his I have seen since The Host. And yes, I still have not seen Parasite. Who knows why. This theme is that I love the experience, but... they don't pull together entirely as a whole for me. I excruciatingly love aspects and details of all these movies (never wrote about Okja; thinking it might have been eaten by The Dark Year, despite coming out in mid-2017) but they don't capture me as a whole. It is for that unattainable reason that I have never ReWatched them.
I will rewatch Mickey17 if only to do a running comparison with the book which I am still reading listening to. So far, much of the book has made it into the movie, but that Mickey himself is not as dimwitted, but still, definitely not the brightest star in the sky.
Kent's view. We pretty much agree, but I may be a smidgen more taken with the movie.
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