After Bestie came out of the movie, she sent me a soda cup with her notes scribbled in permanent ink:
Printer w/ sex. Tardegrades. Shhhhhhh. Laughing. Waist. Teeth. Pheromones. Poro Creepers. Hivemind. Sexpedition. Great mom. 2 Christ roor so good. That looks hot. SAUCES. One and only. Threesome.
Which is to say, I absolutely love notes on sodas now and will demand it every time. In fact, if you didn’t read those notes and think to yourself, I have to see this movie in the next 24 hours, then I don’t know if anything I can offer you at this point is going to really motivate you. Bong Joon Ho is the director of Snowpiercer and Parasite, which for me means big swings, social commentary, dark humor. The basic premise of the film is that there’s this job on an colony ship headed off-world that promises you eternal life with all of your memories intact, but in exchange you’re given all of the “expendable” work and tasks no one else wants to do. A nice tie-in to the tone deaf “essential” and “non-essential” distinctions made during the early days of the pandemic, but also a fun way to play with multiples without resorting to the multiverse.
Mickey 17 feels like a mashup of some of my most beloved contemporary sci fi: Mur Lafferty’s penchant for clones and murder plots meets Ann Leckie’s post-colonial critiques of galactic empire. The film’s energy is frenetic, frantic, addled, always right on the edge of falling off the rails with sight gags and cut-tos, but the movie never gets mired in the maudlin or earnest. Bong Joon Ho characterizes through small acts, sensitive observations that go uncommented upon or embellished by swelling music or sad pianos. People are messy, their actions are not always explained, foreshadowed, or vetted as authentic or winked at as performative. Mark Ruffalo’s brittle tyrant sports a stiff, artificial smile, a people pleasing impulse that requires constant check-ins for affirmation and advice from his ever-present wife, which alternates between manipulative, biting, and fawning. His politics swings wildly from cult worship to business entrepreneurialism to monkish asceticism to free love, wonkish caloric efficiency followed by discussions of breeding a new planet with his own seed.
Similarly Naomi Ackie’s compulsion for love, kindness, and romance is never explained, and despite maybe appearing like a recipe for a doting wife trope, she finds ways to break out of those stereotypes and behave unpredictably with joy and rage. Pattinson’s performance is in some ways the easiest because he’s literally bifurcated unlike his ensemble cast, but his range for voices and the mesmerizing dialogue between his multiples, the way that his friends and romantic interests take his multiplicity in stride, remark upon the differences of his iterations without judgement is so rich.
Mickey 17 finds ways to blend eroticism with danger and cruelty, but also ways to transform characters and situations that feel dangerous or cruel into moments of tenderness and warmth. Its the modal complexity and polysemy of being that gives Mickey 17 so much depth and weirdness to it. It’s a smaller concept than Snowpiercer, which was scuttled by too many stars doing too little on a microcosm of society, and Parasite is circumscribed by realism, but Mickey 17 is humming with imaginative rabbit holes that are explored and hinted at in interesting ways.
