It’s very difficult for me to talk about “Mickey-17”, Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s most recent film. It was a monumental task to follow up on his previous film “Parasite”, which was both a huge critical success, winning the Oscar for Best Picture in 2019, and a massive commercial success. 

All this considered, I still came away from “Mickey-17” not feeling much other than an empty sensation in my stomach. 

The film tells the story of Mickey, a member of an expedition to occupy a new planet who works as an expendable, a person who does dangerous jobs on the ship and is reprinted if he were to die, and what happens when a copy of himself is printed without him having died.

‘Mickey-17’ is a sleek and stylish social satire that treads incredibly familiar themes to Joon Ho’s other works. The editing allows the film to flow at a brisk pace as it explores different absurd aspects of both the community formed on the ship and society today. 

While the film is reminiscent of Joon Ho’s other work, it differs in its bombastic presentation and lack of subtlety. “Mickey-17” is Bong Joon Ho’s first film to be both produced and distributed by a major film studio being funded by Warner Bros. I mention this because I believe that this is where the faults of the film lie. 

“Mickey-17” is at its best when it is a small-scale story about weird characters navigating a weird world, however, it starts to unravel when it strays into becoming a big-budget blockbuster. 

The last 30 minutes of the movie are extremely long and drawn out and boil down to a big CGI schlocky action sequence that abandons the interesting ideas put in place at the beginning of the film in place of brain-dead action set pieces. 

I believe that for a similar reason, the film is painstakingly upfront about its themes, so much so that at points it feels like the film is screaming at you, saying that this is the point of the film. 

In total, while this film didn’t entirely work for me, I would still recommend seeing it in theaters so that we encourage big studios to take risks on creative and original films.