By Jeff Xilon (@jxilon.bsky.social)
A note about spoilers: I am of the belief that there should be no time-limit on spoiler warnings. This is especially true of movies with surprises, but it is true of any. You can only watch “The Sixth Sense” for the first time once. You can only watch “12 Monkeys” for the first time once. You can only watch “Breathless” or “Dial M for Murder” for the first time once. I don’t think people should be denied the opportunity to have those unique experiences without having consciously made the choice to deny it to themselves. Therefore, I warn you now this this review has spoilers, for “Mickey 17”, “Starship Troopers”, “Doctor Strangelove”, and “Exotica.”
Back in 1997, 18-year-old me sat down in a theatre with some friends to watch “Starship Troopers”. Ninety-six minutes later Dizzy Flores (Dina Meyer) dies in Johnny Rico’s arms (Caspar Van Dien) after being savagely impaled multiple times by a giant alien bug, but not before telling him that it was OK, because she “got to have him.”
Got to have him, in this case, meant they’d had sex in the scene before, after her having been in love with him, but ignored in favour of Johnny’s previous girlfriend, for years. There is no need to go into the entire teen psychology of why that has meant that I have loathed that movie for every minute from its 97th then through every minute of my life in the 28 years since, and probably always will, but suffice it to say, I have.
I have also never forgotten that movie, and neither have many many other people, most of whom do not loathe it, but in fact love it, and that is why it has achieved the status of Legendary Cult Classic, despite being a box office flop. Would you like to know more?
I bring this all up in a piece on Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” for a couple reasons. First, because many people are going to immediately reach to “Starship Troopers” for comparison’s sake when talking about “Mickey 17”, so best to get some bias out front and in the open. Second, because I promise you this movie will also one day achieve Legendary Cult Classic status, despite probably being destined to be a box office flop, and it’s important to remember that box office success or failure has nothing to do with whether a movie is worthy of your time.
Before we get to that let me briefly try to outline “Mickey 17”. Mickey 17, the character, is the latest incarnation (yes, the 17th) of Mickey Barnes, who signed up to be an “expendable” on an interstellar expedition to colonize a new planet being put together by an ex-politician and his cult-like fans and followers. An expendable is someone who agrees to have their brain mapped and uploaded to a back-up drive and their body uploaded to a bio-printer so that they can be cloned as needed whenever they die and therefore be put to work doing things very likely to, or even intended to, kill them. Mickey is largely treated as an ongoing lab rat and curiosity by most of the expedition. There are some exceptions, of course, like the leader of it all who loathes him as sub-human and the girlfriend he makes early on, Naomi Ackie’s Nasha, who loves him. Eventually we get aliens, chaos, violations of cloning rules, and general mayhem and fascist malevolence.
There are obvious reasons why people are going to compare this movie to “Starship Troopers”: They are both steeped in satire. They both involve humans fighting very non-human aliens on an alien world and the humans, by and large, are pretty fascist-y. The problem is, these obvious points of similarity are incredibly shallow. You don’t even have to scratch the surface to see these aren’t really similar at all. A light puff of breath would scatter the illusion like dust. Still, I suspect a lot of people are going to say, “Meh, ‘Starship Troopers’ did this better.” The problem is that they really aren’t trying to do the same thing at all.
For example, I’ve already seen some complaints that “Mickey 17” isn’t edgy enough, that is it is too on the nose, that Mark Ruffalo lays it on way too thick, that, in essence, it isn’t subtle enough.
Not like “Starship Troopers”. To this I’d say — yep, that is all correct — and that’s a good thing! Paul Verhoeven’s “Troopers” is SO subtle, at least until its late reveals, that many people didn’t even see it as satire. In a world where right-wing politicians have managed to miss the fact that Rage Against The Machine’s politics are not friendly to their beliefs on multiple occasions, subtlety itself is not automatically a virtue.
Even more importantly: Satire has always been a genre that lends itself to absurdist hyperbolic approaches!
Mark Ruffalo’s evil, gloriously over-the-top, ridiculous-but-terrifying villain Kenneth Marshall, an obvious mashup of many of the “qualities” of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, is absolutely at home in the genre of Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay, “A Modest Proposal” — a piece of satire that was about as unsubtle as possible.
In the world of film, absurd satires rank as some of the consensus greatest comedies ever made. There is nothing subtle about Rob Reiner’s “This Is Spinal Tap”. Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant “Doctor Strangelove” ends with the destruction of the world, preceded slightly by an American soldier riding a nuclear bomb as it falls to earth shouting and hooting in glee while waving his cowboy hat. The character of Doctor Strangelove can’t help but constantly throw out nazi salutes no matter how hard he tries to stop his body’s compulsion to continue to respect his former affliations. No, one does not need to be subtle to be good satire, not even a little bit.
I worry about this a bit, because I think too many people nowadays are far too likely to automatically file deliberate absurdity as something lesser. After all, the market has been flooded for a couple decades now by people trying to make ridiculous “bad movies” on purpose to capture the fans of B movies that were ridiculous and bad because they were subject to tiny budgets and incompetent participants and perhaps modern audiences of “Mickey 17” are far more likely to have seen Sharknado or its derivatives than “Strangelove” or “Spinal Tap” — but well crafted absurd hyperbole is not the same thing as a B grade movie goofy aesthetic, deliberately made or not.
Similarly, we are far too likely to read grim and gritty as somehow more worthy of being considered “quality” entertainment than that which does not revel in such modes and I worry that is another tendency of the modern audience that will drive it to dismiss “Mickey 17.”
“It’s not edgy enough” or “it pulls its punches.”
Nevermind that we get some quite gruesome scenes of what is done to Mickey as an expendable or things like a methuselahian loanshark who takes his pleasure from watching his debtors who fall into arrears killed in front of him by being methodically cut to pieces with a chainsaw. (Yes, nota bene: “Mickey 17” definitely offers up some gruesome stuff at times, though, that certainly isn’t its constant focus. There’s enough there to turn away and strongly turn off more than a few viewers though, and fairly so!) Despite that the core complaint here will be, though perhaps not said directly: “Mickey 17” is too nice.
I for one would respond to that with: And why is that a bad thing?
A couple years ago, upon recommendation from the editors at Bright Wall/Dark Room (I provided a list of favourite movies; they provided a list of suggestions) I watched Atom Egoyan’s 1994 movie “Exotica”. It was, frankly, amazing. I expected it was supposed to be something sleazy and grim and, while watching, thought it was likely to go to some awfully dark places. It ended up being something shockingly cathartic and quite beautiful in its own way. When I afterwards went to consume reviews written about it I was utterly shocked and dismayed to encounter people who felt the movie was bad or boring for having not been the sleazefest they expected it to be. Everyone is entitled to enjoy or not enjoy what they like, but I fully admit I could only feel shock, and even horror, at the idea of people having been handed something that felt like beautiful meditation on loss and pain and healing and compassion and shrugging it off for not having enough sleaze and not being nasty enough in temperament.
“Mickey 17”, like any movie, could have gone in different directions than it does. You will be able to identify plenty of places where different creators would have or could have made different choices. Some of them much meaner, much grittier, with sharper edges. I celebrate the fact that Bong Joon Ho didn’t make those choices.
You remember why I hated “Starship Troopers”? Well Mickey 17 gives us a relationship involving a somewhat obsessed seeming woman too — but instead of it being about a woman whose highest ambition is to be with a man she’s had a crush on since high school it gives us something a bit strange and hard to pin down, but absolutely rooted in love and empathy. Instead of the cliche of the female character who must be punished or killed for having sex, a la “Troopers”, “Mickey 17” gives us a couple for whom sex is an act centred in being a fun, shared exploration of joy for both people with the mature viewpoint that demonstrates talking and planning and listening to each other does not make things any less enjoyable. Heck, Mickey and Nasha’s joyful sex life is integral to everything not ending up very bad for everyone. I think that’s both pretty cool and wildly different from the kinds of choices so many movies make.
And that is maybe getting to the core reason why I think “Mickey 17” is well worth people’s time and destined to be a cult classic. This movie is chock full of interesting ideas in its science fiction but also in its language of film and what it is trying to say about people in general.
An essay could be written about how each version of Mickey is not exactly the same person and what that means. (Is Mickey one entity or a gestalt of many. Does each Mickey truly die and each one printed truly new? Why are different Mickeys different?)
An essay could be written about the parallels between Mickey 17’s relationship with Nasha and Kenneth Marshall’s relationship with his sauce obsessed wife, Ylfa. (They are both somewhat submissive men lacking confidence with a stronger woman partner, but Mickey celebrates and takes pleasure in supporting Nasha, while Kenneth relies on Ylfa to support him.)
An essay could be written about why Mickey finally answers a question about death asked by security agent Kai that he refuses to answer for anyone else. (And what the movie has to say about empathy in general.)
An essay could be written about the movie’s working class politics. (Yes, this expedition is largely filled with happy members of a fascist cult of personality, but plenty of people on it, like Mickey, are just trying to get out of a bad situation on earth and are stuck living with these folks, you know, kind of like good people living in Red State America, or Alberta.)
An essay could be written about how people treat Mickey once he is an expendable. (Yep, it’s not subtle, but I think I’ve made it clear where I stand on that point.)
You get the idea.
Now, to be fair to those with criticisms of “Mickey 17”, this is a good point to admit that this is definitely not a perfect movie. One of its biggest flaws is that it’s trying to cram way too much into its run time yet it also has some things it starts and then just drops. Most glaring and frustrating of these is a subplot with the aforementioned Kai that is briefly very important and then it just…disappears as if it never was. Thanks to these sorts of problems at times “Mickey 17” feels like it is both too long (trying to cram in too much) and not nearly long enough (not giving some things the time they need). There is a world where Bong Joon Ho and company made this as an 8 part limited series for Apple TV and it was better served for it.
On the other hand, I like the aliens.
To begin this I told you that, despite the fact I’ve always held onto a loathing for “Starship Troopers”, I have never forgotten that movie in the 28 years since it came out. I’m telling you now again that I am absolutely certain that I will be very unlikely to ever forget “Mickey 17”. I’ve seen it said many times that it is not Bong Joon Ho’s best work, but that is fine. Something does not need to be an artist’s best piece to be a good one. In “Mickey 17” not only has Bong Joon Ho and his fantastic cast made a good movie, they made one that is quite unique and more interesting than most. If nothing else, anyone who can stomach the sometimes gruesome parts owes it to themselves to see Ruffalo’s tremendous foray into utterly ridiculous villain who is menacing none-the-less.
