A Review of Mickey 17, or, Bong Joon-Ho's Asinine Americentrism

"Our entire life is a punishment."

Is Bong Joon-ho, the revered South Korean auteur, the same director he was in 2019? Or did the runaway success of his previous feature, Parasite, transform the filmmaker and his work in a fundamental, perhaps irreversible manner? To that end, is any human being “the same person” that they were six years ago, last month, yesterday? Where does what we so reductively call “the self” reside, anyway?

Is this “self” inside our brains? Our bodies? Does it emerge out of the continual interplay, from the screams of birth to the whimpers of death, between our one specific brain and our one specific body? What about our words, thoughts, relationships, loves, hatreds, desires, fantasies—are those more incorporeal parts of us any less essential to the constitution of our selves, our embodied individuality? And what if scientists could 3D-print a perfect clone of you, complete with all those ostensibly one-of-a-kind parts? Where would that leave “you” then?

What if, to give a plausible example, an advanced race of inter-dimensional goblins froze the forward progress of time, abducted and incinerated your body, replaced you with a clone that possessed your exact combination of memories and personality traits, and then started the clocks back ticking again, so no one could know any abduction or incineration or substitution had occurred? In that scenario, would “you” have ceased to exist? Or would the clone carrying on your day-to-day life “be you”? Can you be completely and unequivocally certain, reading these words, that you aren’t in fact a swapped-in-by-space-goblins clone of a discarded previous version of yourself? Would watching Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 as a clone make the movie feel like anything other than a tedious, discordant, and embarrassing disaster?

No, it wouldn’t: Because Mickey 17 plays like it was written and directed by a botched clone of Bong Joon-ho. Like Multiplicity and The Adventures of Pluto Nash before it, the plot, characterizations, and themes of Mickey 17 hinge on the invention of a futuristic cloning device, a sci-fi technology whose mere inclusion in the narrative reflexively raises tried-and-true philosophical debates about personal identity and numerical identity. As cheaply as they are implemented here, these are important real-world conversations about when consciousness begins and ends; the bonds between mind and body; how much we should or shouldn’t care about dying; and what residue of our existence, if any, will persist after we depart this plane. Before Parasite, Bong Joon-ho likely would have leveraged a ~$10 million budget to interrogate the complex ideas at the center of Mickey 17 with his signature blend of black humor, slyly poignant satire, and scathing class critique. And yet, armed with more resources and interest than he has ever had in his career, he introduces these concepts (and about fifty others) as quickly as he forgets about them, not even leaving a scratch on their surface.

That Mickey 17 fails so spectacularly, that it represents such a sore-thumb outlier in Joon-ho’s filmography, forces the viewer to consider another ontological dilemma. Specifically, it prompts us to identify what distinguished The Bong Joon-ho Who Directed The Host and Snowpiercer, and how those qualities differ from those of The Bong Joon-ho Who Directed Mickey 17. While the stylistic markers and formal motifs of the director’s zanier genre efforts—The Host, Snowpiercer, Okja—are all present, they are here encrusted facsimiles half-recycled to a laughable extent. So while Bong Joon-ho may still “be himself” in terms of his biological and psychological continuity, the self revealed in his earlier movies is nowhere to be seen onscreen. Quality-wise, this is not the same director who made Parasite or Memories of Murder. Whereas Bong Joon-ho used to make good movies intended for South Korean audiences, he now makes godawful movies meant to be watched by Americans.

This is already too much mental energy to expend on a film whose sole consistency lies in its unconsidered laziness and an absence of intellectual rigor. (In other words, its American-ness.) The story and its myriad subplots about macaroon franchisees, murderous loansharks, giant tentacular grub worms, and dipping sauces, are a total jumble, but if there is one exemplary flaw to isolate in Mickey 17’s endless array of flaws, it has to be the self-defeating Americentrism of its too-pat political allegory. The commitment to this on-the-nose, sub-SNL satire is enough to make you seriously wonder if Bong Joon-ho has been replaced by a clone: Given the wild political upheaval happening in South Korea, why is he focusing on the United States¹?

In the past, Bong Joon-ho’s anti-capitalism has been firmly grounded in the material inequalities and cultural dynamics of South Korea, leaving the viewer to take the extra step to glimpse the long shadow cast on the Asian nation by the United States. With Mickey 17, that subtext is made text: The foaming-at-the-mouth supporters of the main antagonist, played by a transcendently annoying Mark Ruffalo, literally wear red MAGA-style baseball caps. Unlike Donald Trump, however, Ruffalo’s character is neither entertaining nor funny nor grotesquely compelling. The movie’s telegraphed broadside against the exploitative hypocrisies of American conservatism doesn’t just backfire, but accidentally formalizes the ideological incoherence and weakness at the heart of the liberal response to Trump. (There’s another Substack to be written about how Mickey 17 reflects a mass unconscious desire among Democrats to clone enough swingstate voters to elect Michelle Obama as president.)

During these early phases of its release cycle, film critics and movie podcasters will tie themselves into knots defending Bong Joon-ho’s “right” to carelessly excrete this indulgent folly, justifying this $118-million squandering of talent and resources because it’s an “original” non-franchise conceit² helmed by one of the few consensus visionaries of international cinema. Those are rationalizations that derive not at all from the form or content of Mickey 17, and they obscure the dispiriting reality that, by producing a film this poorly executed, Bong Joon-ho³ has become what his best work has sought to critique. He has become another incompetent multimillionaire failing his way upwards, all while foreclosing opportunities for the masses below.

Numerical Score for Numbskulls

1.25 Grub Worms out of 5 🐛

1. The reason: It was financed by Americans. The same ones who paid $10 million for reshoots.

2. Mickey 17 is an adaptation of Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7.

3. Estimated net worth: $30 million