Moviegoers at the 75th Berlin Film Festival were seeing double over the weekend during the International Premiere of Mickey 17. Bong Joon-ho’s futuristic satire stars Robert Pattinson as one of a series of expendable clones whose sole purpose is to die and be reprinted—again and again and again. The multiples would have been helpful on Saturday night’s red carpet, as the singular Pattinson happily signed autographs and indefatigably posed for at least a dozen selfies with fervent fans crowding the barricades in 30° weather outside the Berlinale Palast.
Among those waiting patiently inside the packed house was Bong vet Tilda Swinton, a villainous official in Bong’s apocalyptic sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer (which made its World Premiere at the 2013 Berlinale) and in town to receive the festival’s honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement. The $118 million Warner Bros film—due to open in the U.S. on March 7—played well with the effusive audience members, who leapt to their feet for a standing ovation after the 137-minute film ended.
Their praise was well-earned. Buoyantly dystopian, Mickey 17 is a crowd-pleasing hoot set in an outer space colony circa 2054 where the morally dubious technological ability to pair body printing with memory transplants allows scientists to fatally and repeatedly experiment on a human life. Why Mickey Barnes? On the run from a loan shark and itching to escape earth, he signed a sure-fire contract—sight unseen—to join an outer space colony on a four-and-a-half-year voyage to distant ice planet Niflheim. “You’re applying to be an expendable?” one of the terrestrial bureaucrats asks him. “You read through the paperwork, right? It’s a pretty extreme job.” He didn’t. “I shoulda read through it,” sighs Mickey in a weary voiceover.
Too late: scientists expose Mickey to radiation, burn his skin, blind him, gas him, mutilate him, infect him with alien viruses, make him bleed from all of his orifices—all guilt-free. If you’re printed back into existence, consciousness intact, do you ever really die? It’s a question the sweet but dim-witted 17th iteration of Mickey elides, referring to other peoples’ “ethical fights and religious blah-blah blah” about the controversial technology, and accepting his Job-like job with an existential shrug.
“I like playing characters who have an incredibly complicated philosophical situation they have to deal with, but not the typical character who would be thinking about this in normal circumstances,” Pattinson explained during a standing-room-only press conference after the film’s morning press screening. “Basically asking, ‘Why do I exist?’, but having a silly character trying to consider it.”
Adding to the cosmic joke is the recurring sight gag of the printing process, with Pattinson’s naked body occasionally falling to the ground as it rolls out of the meat-matrix machine. “The printing is tragic and funny at the same time,” said Bong. “And when I thought of Rob Pattinson, I was in a good mood thinking I’d be printing him out endlessly. He’s very printable, you know?”
Pattinson leads (and technically outnumbers) a cast that includes love interest Naomi Ackie as special agent Nasha; Steven Yuen as two-timing opportunistic friend Timo; Anamaria Vartolomei as special agent Kai, who’s secretly sweet for Mickey; as well as Mark Ruffalo as dim-witted fascistic politician Kenneth Marshall, with Toni Collette as conniving wife Ylfa, Kenneth’s intergalactic Lady Macbeth.
Everyone but Ruffalo was attendance at the gushy, giggly Berlin press conference, which quickly became a Bong liebe-fest. “Bong has been on my bucket list of directors to work with ever since I started acting,” confessed Pattinson. “He’s kind of a Mount Rushmore director. All of us just basically said yes before we even knew what it was.”
“I, too, said yes before even seeing the script,” said a smitten Collette. “I’ve never done that before in my life. But when this guy calls you, you just say yes! Bong is a true original, a proper auteur, a visionary, an incredible leader but an even better collaborator. I love you!”
A stoic Yuen pulled rank. “I’ve had the pleasure of working with director Bong two times now,” he deadpanned.
“Show off!” barked Collette, mock-enraged.
Ylfa is the brains behind her thick-headed husband, whom Ruffalo plays as a political variation on his vapid chauvinist Poor Things character Duncan Wedderburn—but MAGA-fied and crossed with the televangelism of Jerry Falwell. His bloviating (he calls a boulder “big, beautiful, handsome” and “manly”) along with his thinly veiled racist references to colonizing a “pure white planet” with “people like us” are unmistakably Trumpian. So, too, his followers, who wear red caps emblazoned with their own slogan (in this case ONE AND ONLY, in reference to their own dogmatic anti-cloning philosophy).
Bong was coy when asked about it, though, insisting that any resemblance to a current world leader is purely coincidental. “It seems like you have certain politicians of modern times that you’re thinking of,” he demurred, saying he was inspired in part by bad former politicians in Korea. “I made this character drawing my inspiration from the past. And as history is always repeating myself, it might seem like I’m referring to someone in the present.” Riiight.
But he did at least admit being pleased that people found relevancy in Mickey 17, a movie where human life gets devalued, where religion and corporations are conflated, and where an egomaniacal fundamentalist wants to populate a new world with a sex encouragement program that is very pro-life. “It’s science fiction and it’s outer space,” Bong said. “And although it’s a story of the future, it feels like a story that could happen in the present. If it seems to cover current events as well, this kind of reaction is a reaction I am thankful for.”
<