I’m sure he wasn’t the first director and he won’t be the last, but I call it The Michael Cimino Syndrome. Whenever a director wins a Best Director Oscar, they decide to have a far more grandiose follow-up and it fails extraordinarily. Five years ago, Bong Joon Ho became a household name and a major Hollywood player when his movie Parasite was a surprise hit at the 2020 Oscars and went on to make over a quarter of a billion dollars worldwide.
And now, it seems he’s fallen ill to the same syndrome. The director did have some obstacles in the way such as Covid-19 happening within a month of the Oscar ceremony and the 2023 WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes. But there is another problem with Mickey 17 and when I saw the trailer back in October, I knew what it was. It looked too much like something audiences had already seen before.
I could already see this was the type of movie Taika Waititi would’ve made before the disaster that was Thor: Love and Thunder kinda ruined his rep. And maybe it’s because of that movie and its look, audiences didn’t want to sit through two hours and 15 minutes of a movie that stops being fascinating after seeing the three minute trailer. Yes, it’s another sci-fi movie about clones and a black comedy feel that isn’t as funny as the filmmakers think it would be.
There’s nothing funny about a man begging for his life before he is chopped to pieces by a chainsaw. Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) and his friend, Timo (Stephen Yeun), are trying to escape a loan shark so they board a spaceship to colonize the ice-planet Niflheim. And Mickey agrees to be an “expendables” which means he will be basically used for medical experiments.
So, yadda-yadda-yadda, he keeps dying and being cloned again. But he’s assumed to be killed and devoured by Niflheim creatures called “Creepers” who look like giant dust mites. So, another Mickey is cloned but Mickey 17 survives because the Creepers aren’t exactly as primitive as the people think.
Yes, the social commentary is all over the place. The movie touches on colonization, human socioeconomic class system and thoughts of human superiority over other species and creatures. There’s also a Donald Trump-like figure with Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a failed politician who is an egomaniac and more controlling and sinister wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette). Neither Ruffalo and Collette, who have the ability to escape into their roles, never really make their characters believable. They’re just more like the Saturday Night Live parody The Californians. You get the joke instantly but there’s no substance to it.
Yeun is wasted as Timo. He seems to be doing a variation of the character he played in Netflix’s Beef just without the character development. There’s not much development to the other characters. And just when you think this movie is over, it lingers on longer. No wonder it failed at the box office. I’m sure people were telling others to wait till it goes to streaming or DVD.
Hopefully, another filmmaker will see this type of movie and decided NOT to make another clone of it. It is possible to make a sci-fi movie and leave out the clones.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 