Mickey 17 hits all of Bong Joon Ho’s obsessions, from Snowpiercer to Parasite

In simplistic terms, Bong Joon Ho’s wry, satirical sci-fi saga Mickey 17 combines his other two English-language movies, merging the frigid setting of his post-apocalyptic action-drama Snowpiercer with the animal-loving sentimentality of his food-industry fable Okja. The new film, in which Robert Pattinson plays several kooky versions of the same disposable worker drone, is Bong’s hotly anticipated follow-up to his darkly comic Best Picture winner Parasite.

While Mickey 17 is adapted from Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, Ashton’s version is a much more straightforward sci-fi story than Bong’s. In the Korean virtuoso’s hands, this story plays out like an extension of nearly every theme and visual approach he’s used throughout his lengthy career.

People in power are ridiculous

You can reasonably draw stylistic distinctions between Bong’s Korean-language cinema and his English-language projects, which usually come down to the way he frames Western power structures, and the characters representing them. Although Snowpiercer is a Korean production, the movie — adapted from the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige — features a charging locomotive as a metaphor for class and capitalism, but portrays the curators of this system as villains whose cartoonish appearance quickly reveals a nastier side. The most memorable among them is Tilda Swinton’s Margaret Thatcher-esque Minister Mason. Her bug-eyed glasses and protruding veneers give her an almost alien appearance as she keeps the train’s lower classes in line through violence and cruelty, like having dissenters’ limbs lopped off with hammers.

Mason’s vicious ideology and idiosyncrasies are also reflected in key figures in Okja, Bong’s Netflix production about an adorable super-pig bred for its meat. On one hand, Swinton’s Okja villain, Lucy Mirando, is a powerful CEO whose glossy sheen, white pantsuits, and smiling facade reflect a welcoming corporate front that conceals something darker. (Albeit barely.) On the other hand, Jake Gyllenhaal’s zany, coked-out TV host Johnny Wilcox, whose efforts align with Mirando’s, functions as a kind of propaganda machine, bellowing from rooftops (or television sets) about the efficacy of his new product: a lovable creature genetically engineered to be a food source.

These characters are deeply caricatured depictions of the people who tend to hold American and British power, which is also the case in Mickey 17, perhaps Bong’s most thinly veiled political analogy yet. The movie’s villain, the opportunistic leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), is a distinctly Trump-like figure whose dangerous associations with religious zealotry and white nationalism are mere avenues to earn political credibility among his base.

The version of Marshall in Ashton’s novel is a mundane bureaucratic officer leading the terraforming colony on a planet called Niflheim. But Bong’s screenplay turns this incidental player into a contemporary political satire. Like Swinton’s Mason, he wears thick veneers (though his are pearly white), projecting the character’s fakeness each time he opens his mouth to speak. While standing alongside his sycophantic gourmet wife Ylfa — Toni Collette’s white-clad first lady of the colony, a stylistic descendant of Swinton’s Mirando — Marshall gesticulates wildly to capture the attention of his ardent fans. His booming attempts at proclamation make him feel like he’s constantly performing, not unlike Gyllenhaal’s TV personality in Okja.

The Trump-esque stylization of Marshall (whose supporters don red hats with political slogans) and the overall political entanglements of Mickey 17 are entirely Bong’s addition to the story. That’s especially true of the character’s white-nationalist undertones, which go hand in hand with the corporate fascism that renders workers like Mickey Barnes (Pattinson) so disposable that his corporate overlords can produce copy after copy of him to experiment on or kill off in dangerous jobs.

In Bong’s cinema, modern fascism (especially Western fascism) exists at the strange nexus where evil meets cartoonish idiocy. This approach, embodied by Bong’s foppish English-speaking villains, feels distinctly true to life as soon as you glance at the Donald Trumps, Boris Johnsons, Jair Bolsonaros, and Javier Mileis of the world, clownish political figures whose ideologies do real harm, even though their personalities are great fodder for entertainment. They’re all but reality TV figures. (Except in Trump’s case; he quite literally was one.) 

Framing lies vs. framing the truth

But these villains’ broad appearances and rancid ideologies aren’t their only defining qualities in the realm of Bong’s cinema. What makes his over-the-top caricatures of modern leaders especially potent as commentary — both on individual real-world figures and on the ebb and flow of modern politics — is the straightforward way they express themselves, and the nakedness of their messages. In Mickey 17, Bong communicates this baldness of messaging in part via head-on close-ups of heroes, villains, and antiheroes like. That may seem like an obvious dramatic approach, but Bong’s movies have long existed in a tug-of-war between revealing characters’ truest selves and hiding them, based largely on how they’re framed visually.

Bong has long played with the question of truth and how it’s wielded by the powerful and the powerless alike, a question he answers by revealing and obscuring human faces. His 2003 true-crime thriller Memories of Murder and his seedy 2009 mystery-drama Mother both deal with uncertainties the audience is forced to parse before coming to uneasy conclusions, if they reach any conclusions at all. Over the course of these movies, Bong disguises emotional truths through oblique framing, catching protagonists and antagonists alike in shots approaching profile, obfuscating their faces — and in the process, their intentions. The audience is left uncertain about what these people want or what their words mean, until key moments when characters practically turn toward the camera to be captured head-on, revealing glimpses of raw vulnerability — or something more disturbing.

For instance, throughout much of Snowpiercer, protagonist Curtis Everett (Chris Evans) leads his revolutionary thrust through the train’s many affluent carriages by charging forward. To keep track of the geography and momentum of this linear revolution, Bong shoots most of his action in profile as the heroes move from left to right, like in a side-scroller video game.

This has the secondary effect of turning Everett into a symbol first and a person second — somewhat like his MCU role as Captain America — since we see his physical shape more than we see his face. This approach ties into the movie’s ultimate twist, vis-à-vis the real circumstances around Everett’s revolt, and his position as a leader. However, by obscuring him, Bong never quite gives the audience a distinct window into his humanity — until a key moment of confession, shot in close-up, during which he reveals disturbing truths about the things he’s done to survive.

Bong makes these shifts of framing haunting throughout his films, because of how sparingly they employ close-ups. Parasite, on the other hand, reads to audiences as satirical and tongue-in-cheek, even though it’s filled to the brim with close-ups, because as duplicitous as its poor, domestic helper characters can be, there’s always a sense that their motives are barely concealed.

The members of Parasite’s central impoverished family, led by patriarch Kim Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), are always lying to the film’s wealthy employers in ways that are obvious to the viewer, practically challenging the rich, naive antagonists to catch on. Their wealthy bubbles ensure they never do. Part of this distinction, between what the audience sees and what the movie’s rich characters fail to intuit, stems from the need to inform us about when exactly the Kim family is skirting the truth in order to take advantage of the already advantaged. And so Bong furnishes us with head-on close-ups of them as they project their intentions and their subtext for the camera.

This naked approach to underlying motivation defines Bong’s English-language villains, including and especially Ruffalo’s Marshall. While lying can be a useful political tool, the kind of white lies that read as dog whistles and coded political doublespeak are the discourse du jour. So while Marshall’s and his wife’s words may contain half-truths and untruths, Bong’s camera lingers on their close-ups just long enough to discern what really lies beneath his text. Which is to say, the cartoonishly obvious subtext, fit for a cartoonishly obvious political sphere.

Following the money and the mania

One can’t discuss Bong’s work without discussing the way he approaches the mechanics (and fallout) of rigid capitalistic structures. After all, these economic critiques lie at the heart of his political satire. Greed and subjugation lie at the heart of villains like Mason, Wilcox, and Marshall. And they’re the fuel to the numerous structural and sci-fi metaphors throughout Bong’s career. That dynamic reaches from the back-car-front-car structure of Snowpiercer to the upstairs-downstairs drama of Parasite to the question of who’s most affected by the mutant monster in his 2006 creature feature The Host — another film in which the specter of American power looms large.

However, the facet of Bong’s filmmaking that most prevents his work from falling into rote sermonizing is that his messages are seldom conveyed through dialogue. More often than not, the movement of human bodies is the most effective tool in telling his stories. You could watch any of his films on mute and still catch the propulsive chaos of the human form in motion (say, the chase scenes in The Host and Okja), which isn’t just used to transition sequences from place to place. Flailing, wild gesticulating, and people falling over one another in a mad scramble is a central part of the camera’s focus, and has practically become a calling card for Bong.

Whether the huddled masses toppling over each other mid-sprint are protagonists, like the Kim family in Parasite, or are made up of anonymous extras, they have a distinct sense of life and purpose. This is perhaps the ultimate counterpoint to the distinct, individualistic villains Bong creates. In Mickey 17, a stampede ensues during a political rally. People fall over each other in a mad dash, while the colony’s security forces sprint to protect their leader. The whole scene emphasizes the separation between the movie’s oligarchs and their disposable underlings. The film expresses how workers are undervalued in capitalist systems, to the point where their deaths become acceptable. But simply highlighting this point of view in the abstract isn’t enough for Bong’s incisive, exacting form of ideologically flavored entertainment.

Much like in Parasite, the counterpoints play out in self-evident ways, with the question of “Who are the most undervalued members of society?” being answered not with a didactic statement, but with another question: “Which class is most valued instead?” The form this answer takes involves exaggerated sendups of the rich and powerful, whose oblivious idiocy goes hand in hand with destructive intent — the kind their position allows them to bring to fruition, and allows them to all but state explicitly, without fear or consequence. Making this kind of caricature the alternative to the human dignity of those on the lowest rungs of the social ladder is how Bong makes his films not just amusing, but politically rousing.

That can seldom be said of most mainstream Hollywood movies, especially at a time when studios are increasingly aiming to politically appease those in government by removing specific puzzle pieces (for instance, transgender storylines or environmental themes) that might upset the powers that be — as if these subplots were designed with this contingency in mind. Bong, on the other hand, weaves his political critique through the very fabric of his films, from his stories and character designs, right down to the way people move across the screen. Throughout his work, entertaining and speaking truth to power are so inseparable they might as well be one and the same.