By Michael Marano

Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 is one of the most vicious, cruel, and savagely arch vivisections of our global economic and sociopolitical reality since … well … Bong’s 2013 movie Snowpiercer.

Mickey 17, directed by Bong Joon Ho. Screening at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, AMC Causeway, AMC Boston Common 19, Kendall Square Cinema, Coolidge Corner Theatre, and other cinemas around New England.

Robert Pattinson in a scene from Mickey 17. Photo: YouTube

With apologies to Gil Scott-Heron, it looks like the Colonization Will Be Televised.

And television might be the fundamental reason for the Colonization in the first place.

Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 is one of the most vicious, cruel, and savagely arch vivisections of our global economic and socio-political reality since … well … Bong’s 2013 movie Snowpiercer. When accounting for the international success of his 2019 class-war movie Parasite, Bong said, “I think maybe there is no borderline between countries now because we all live in the same country, it’s called ‘capitalism.'”

Mickey 17 extends that erasure of borderlines to intergalactic space, incorporating and skewering our species-wide media fixations as he does so. There’s no escaping that “same country,” even past our solar system.

In Snowpiercer, the science fictional oppressor on top of the capitalistic heap was Ed Harris, who played an Ayn Randian John Galt-ish figure of (albeit evil) intelligence, ability, and accomplishment who didn’t need the media and religion to reshape the course of human development. He just needed his own warped vision. That made sense, in 2013. With Mickey 17, inspired by a post-Trump reality, Bong has figured out how incomplete his vision for Snowpiercer was. Stupidity, bluster, television, dumbed-down spirituality, and Musk-like junk science are just as vital for capitalistic oppression as are money and control of resources. In Snowpiercer, capitalism is squished into the microcosm of a single train, going around the world in circles. In Mickey 17 it’s macrocosmic, depicting how Earth’s capitalism colonizes another planet not under the banner of Star Trek‘s Federation, but under sweat-stained and cheaply made MAGA caps, nested atop the empty skulls of people who embody the worst of our species, but think they embody its eugenically and most rarified best.

That both Snowpiercer and Mickey 17 feature access to steak as a tool of oppression makes the movies a diptych.

Along with the fact that in both movies, humans are meat disposable in inverse proportion to the value of those juicy steaks.

Robert Pattinson plays a schlub named Mickey, our protagonist cut of meat, who talks like a high school kid from Peoria auditioning for a community theater production of Guys and Dolls. Mickey lands in deep shit with a loan shark on Earth along with his buddy, Timo (Steven Yeun, who’s so funny that this, along with Nope, should solidify his having a career in darkly humorous science fiction movies from now on). The wacky pair escape, French Foreign Legion-style, by signing onto a colony ship, hoping a few light years between themselves and the chainsaw-wielding loan shark will keep them safe. But “safe” just ain’t in the cards for Mickey. Not one to read the fine print, dim-bulb Mickey signs on as an “Expendable,” meaning he can be killed over and over again in the service of the mission to populate humans on a distant ice planet, then be 3-D printed out of recycled organic waste and have his memories reloaded, just to be killed again. (Is Mickey’s repeated exposure to lethal alien virus so a vaccine can be rushed into production a Covid joke? I choose to think so.)

The colonizing mission is headed by an inarticulate moron with no substance by the name of Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo). Marshall’s an Earth politician who hosts his own rally-like reality show, whose followers wear the above-mentioned red caps, who puffs his chest out at the thought of being called a “wartime leader,” and who exploits a feared loss of masculinity among his followers so that their pure stock can seed the stars. In this context, the commodification and exploitation of Mickey’s flesh (16 times, no less) in this twisted Capitalist System to the Stars has a parallel in the commodification of the flesh of women, who are above all else valued in terms of their reproductive viability. The death of a young, fertile woman isn’t a tragedy because it is loss of a life. No, it is the loss of a healthy uterus, a worthy vessel. This slaps kinda hard in the post-Roe reality that Trump created.

Bong denied to Entertainment Weekly that Marshall’s a Trump stand-in.

Yeah… I don’t buy it.

Marshall might be an amalgam of multiple awful world leaders, as Bong claims, but the main ingredient is Trump, right down to the weird teeth.

A scene from Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer.

Realpolitik goals, including, but not limited to, genocide, are staged specifically for the TV medium in which Marshall and Trump as entertainer/politicians operate. While there’s no way Bong could’ve predicted the Oval Office ambush of Volodymyr Zelenskyy the other day, there’s no denying that Marshall’s planned eradication of an entire species before the cameras in Mickey 17 is specifically staged because it’s “going to be great television!” the way the Zelenskyy ambush was proclaimed to be by Trump. That an entire species has to die to make Must See TV seems to be beside the point, much the way thousands of Ukrainians will die as a result of the “great television” the former host of The Apprentice provided.

Again, though he denies it, I’m thinking this is Bong’s way of punching back.

In a televised “speech,” Trump took a jab at Parasite‘s Best Picture Oscar win back in 2020. “How bad were the Academy Awards this year, did you see? ‘And the winner is … a movie from South Korea’…. What the hell was that all about? I’m looking for like, let’s get Gone with the Wind, can we get like Gone with the Wind back, please? Sunset Boulevard, so many great movies.”

It’s kind of remarkable to watch a director kick capitalism in the teeth while burning through 150 million capitalist, bourgeois Pig Dog dollars. It feels like blockbuster filmmaking done as performance art, maybe the same way that Kendrick’s riffing on Gil Scott-Heron at the Super Bowl in front of Trump was performance art: “The revolution ’bout to be televised / You picked the right time but the wrong guy.”

Like Marshall’s genocide, and Trump’s ambush of Zelenskyy, Kendrick’s jab was “great television!”

And Mickey 17, while not the best of Bong’s films, is a great night at the movies, puckish, full of acidic and biting wit, staged with precision to make a brilliant point about the idiocy and cruelty of the “same country” we occupy.

Or that occupies us, to the point that we’re disposable commodities in the service of the expansion of that “same country” the way those first 16 Mickeys were.

Mickey 17 is all about a (final?) Mickey coming into his own, which proves to be a revolutionary act, fighting one’s way from being a recycled product to being … y’know … a person.

If the people who oppress us can use media as a tool, maybe media like Mickey 17 and Kendrick’s Super Bowl show can be our counterstrikes.

Novelist, critic, and personal trainer Michael Marano (www.BluePencilMike.com) was first exposed to Bong Joon Ho through a second-or-third-generation VHS bootleg of Barking Dogs Never Bite.