Oh, Mickey, You're So Fine I Guess

It's always interesting to see what an Academy Award winner takes on as their first project after winning the prize. For writer-director Bong Joon Ho -- whose movie Parasite won him awards for both jobs, as well as Best Picture -- the next project was Mickey 17.

In the near future, Mickey Barnes is desperate to escape a bad situation on Earth, and winds up in an arguably worse one: he's on an interplanetary expedition to colonize a new planet. Specifically, he's the mission's "expendable" crewmember, someone sent into dangerous situations -- to invariably be killed -- because he can be "reprinted" to live again. When a strange alien encounter leads to a surprising non-death, Mickey suddenly faces more permanent consequences.

Science fiction was in Bong Joon Ho's background before he made Parasite, with Snowpiercer perhaps being the most widely known. Mickey 17 is cast from a similar mold -- but to me even more resembles the work of Terry Gilliam. The movie's irreverent tone, larger-than-life performances, and bizarre visuals all feel to me like they have a lot in common with Brazil (a movie I did not care for), and the limited future sequences of 12 Monkeys (a movie I truly loved).

It is for this reason that I'm choosing to blog about Mickey 17. To get right to it: I didn't love Mickey 17. And these days, I tend not to bother posting about movies I generally don't enjoy. But in this case, not only were there a few aspects to the film I did like, but I feel like I can clearly imagine the audience that would love all of it. That audience seems like it would include many people who read my blog, who might appreciate a recommendation.

I felt for most of the movie like it wasn't effectively "picking a lane" -- or at least, felt like it wasn't striking a balance between comedy and drama that worked for me. Yet I still found the opening act quite engaging.

I don't generally go for gonzo characters and performances in what mostly feels like a grounded-in-reality movie. But I kind of dug them here. Why does it seem like Robert Pattinson is doing a Steve Buscemi impression for the entire movie? I couldn't say -- but there's also a razor sharpness to the performance that serves the story well. Are we going to get sick and tired of actors giving us a blowhard buffoon clearly meant to evoke Donald Trump? Almost certainly -- but I still found Mark Ruffalo's take here to be entertaining. Can you really based an entire character almost exclusively on their drive to create the perfect sauce for dinner? I don't think so -- but Toni Collette might be the funniest thing about this movie. Plus there's fun work from Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, and others too.

Perhaps unfair expectation worked against my viewing of this Mickey 17, but in any case, I'd give it a middle-of-the-road C. But I have a feeling that fans of hyper-stylized science fiction will really like it, as would many fans of campier movies. I could even imagine watching it again at some point down the road and possibly appreciating it more than I did this time around. So, in the hopes that the movie finds its audience, I'll do my tiny part to spread the word.