Bong Joon-ho – Movie Musings

Indulgent, over-long satire that mixes painfully obvious political targets with on-the-nose comedy

Director: Bong Joon-Ho

Cast: Robert Pattinson (Mickey 17/Mickey 18), Naomi Ackie (Nasha Barridge), Steven Yeun (Timo), Toni Collette (Ylfa Marshall), Mark Ruffalo (Kenneth Marshall), Patsy Ferran (Dorothy), Cameron Britton (Arkady), Daniel Henshall (Preston), Stephen Park (Agent Zeke), Anamaria Vartolomei (Kai Katz), Holliday Grainger (Red Haired recruiter)

In 2050, everyone on the colony ship to the planet Niflheim has a job. Even a washed-up loser like Mickey (Robert Pattinson). His job is the most loserish of all: he’s an ‘expendable’, hired to die repeatedly in all forms of dangerous mission or twisted scientific and medical experiments, with a new body containing all his backed-up memories rolling out of the human body printer. The one rule is there can never be more than one Mickey at a time – so it’s a problem when 17 is thought dead and the more assertive 18 is printed: especially as they are flung into a clash between the colonisers and Niflheim’s giant grub-resembling lifeforms ‘Creepers’. Can Mickey(s) prevent a war that the colony’s leader, a failed politician and TV-star Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his socialite wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), want to provoke?

It’s all thrown together in Bong Joon-Ho’s follow-up to Parasite which trades that film’s sharp, dark social satire and insidious sense of danger for something more-like a brash, loud, obvious joke in the vein of (but grossly inferior to) his Snowpiercer. Mickey 17 is awash in potentially interesting ideas, nearly all of which feel underexplored and poorly exploited over the film’s whoppingly indulgent runtime of nearly two-and-a-half hours, and Bong lines up political targets so thuddingly obvious that you couldn’t miss these fish-in-a-barrel with a half-power pea-shooter.

Mickey 17 actually has more of a feel of a director cutting-lose for a crowd-pleaser, after some intense work. Mickey 17 is almost a knock-about farce, helped a lot by Robert Pattinson’s winning performance as the weakly obliging Mickey 17 who grows both a spine and sense of self-worth. A sense of self-worth that has, not surprisingly, been crushed after a lifetime of failure on Earth leads him to series of blackly-comic deaths (the film’s most successful sequence) that has seen him irradiated and mutilated in space, gassed with a noxious chemical, crushed, incinerated and several other fates.

Not surprisingly, there is a bit of social commentary here: Mickey is essentially a zero-hours contract worker, treated as sub-human by the businessmen and scientists who run this corporate-space-trip. It’s an idea you wish the film had run with more: the darkly comic idea of people so desperate to find a new life that they willingly agree to have that life ended over-and-over again as the price. It’s not something Mickey 17 really explores though: right down to having Mickey sign on due to his lack of attention to contract detail (how interesting would it have been to see a wave of migrant workers actively pushing for the job as their only hope of landing some sort of green card?).

Mickey 17 similarly shirks ideas around the nature of life and death. Questions of how ‘real’ Mickey is – like the Ship of Theseus, if all his parts are replaced is he still the ship? – don’t trouble the film. Neither does it explore an interesting idea that each clone is subtly different: we’ve already got a clear difference between the more ‘Mickey’ like 17 and his assertively defiant 18, and 17 references that other clones have been more biddable, anxious or decisive. Again, it’s a throwaway comment the film doesn’t grasp. Neither, despite the many references to Mickey’s unique experience of death (and the many times he is asked about it) do questions of mortality come into shape: perhaps because Mickey is simply not articulate or imaginative enough to answer them.

Either way, it feels like a series of missed opportunities to say something truly interesting among the knock-about farce of Mickey copies flopping to the floor out of the printer, or resignedly accepting his (many) fates. Especially since what the film does dedicate time to, is a painfully (almost unwatchably so) on-the-nose attack on a certain US leader with Mark Ruffalo’s performance so transparent, they might as well have named the character Tonald Drump. Ruffalo’s performance is the worst kind-of satire: smug, superior and treats it’s target like an idiot, who only morons could support. It’s a large cartoony performance of buck-teeth, preening dialogue matched only by Toni Collette’s equally overblown, ludicrous performance as his cuisine-obsessed wife.

Endless scenes are given to these two, for the film to sneer at them (and, by extension, the millions of people who voted Trump). Now I don’t care for Trump at all, but this sort of clumsy, lazy, arrogant satire essentially only does him a favour by reminding us all how smugly superior Hollywood types can be. So RuffaTrump fakes devout evangelical views, obsesses about being the centre of attention, dreams of his place in the history books while his wife is horrified about shooting Mickey because blood will get on her Persian carpet. It’s the most obvious of obvious targets.

It’s made worse that the film’s corporate satire is as compromised and fake as the conclusion of Minority Report. It’s a film where a colonialist corporate elite defers to a preening autocrat, keeps its colonists on rationed food and sex and sacrifices workers left-and-right for profit. But guess which body eventually emerges to save the day? Yup, those very corporate committee once they learn ‘the truth’. Mickey 17 essentially settles down into the sort of predictably safe Hollywood ending, with all corporate malfeasance rotten apples punished. For a film that starts with big anti-corporate swings, it ends safely certain those in charge will always do the right thing when given the chance.

Much of the rest of Mickey 17 is crammed with ideas that usually pad out a semi-decent 45 minute episode of Doctor Who. Of course, the deadly, giant insect-like aliens are going to turn out to be decent, humanitarian souls – just as inevitable as the mankind bosses being the baddies. It’s as obvious, as the film’s continual divide of its cast list into goodies and baddies.

Mickey 17’s overlong, slow pacing doesn’t help. An elongated sequence with Anamaria Vartolomei’s security guard who has the hots for Mickey 17 (every female in the film, except maybe Collette, fancies him proving even losers get girls if they look like Robert Pattinson) could (and should) have been cut – especially as that would also involve losing an interminable dinner-party scene with Ruffalo and Collette. The final sequence aims for anti-populist messaging and action – but is really just a long series of characters saying obvious things to each other. Despite Pattinson’s fine performance – and some good work from Ackie – Mickey 17 is a huge let-down which, despite flashes of Bong’s skill, feels like a great director cruising on self-indulgent autopilot, taking every opportunity for gags over depth or heart. Not a success.

The Kim family juggle poverty with dreams of improvement in the brilliant Parasite

Director: Bong Joon-Ho

Cast: Song Kang-Ho (Kim Ki-taek), Choi Woo-shik (Kim Ki-woo), Park So-dam (Kim Ki-jeong), Jang Hye-jin (Kim Chung-sook), Lee Sun-kyun (Park Dong-ik), Cho Yeo-jeung (Park Yeon-gyo), Jung Ji-so (Park Da-hye), Jung Hyeon-jun (Park Da-song), Lee Jung-eun (Gook Moon-gwang), Park Geun-rok (Yoon), Park Seo-joon (Min-hyuk)

I’m writing this in the glorious after-glow of Parasite’s shock win for Best Picture, finally breaking (after 92 years!) the taboo on foreign language films lifting the Big One at the Hollywood’s annual love in. So let’s just say: not only is it a delight to see Hollywood breaking “the 1-inch barrier of subtitles” (to quote Bong from his Best Director at the Golden Globes), but also it’s a thrill to see the Oscar go to something that can make a legitimate claim to being the Best Picture of the Year – not to mention a film that speaks to the modern world in a way very few nominees have done since Get Out.

Bong’s superb picture has found such universal appeal perhaps because it so completely understands questions of class and wealth in our modern world. Set in an unnamed South Korean city, we are introduced to both the extreme poor and the extreme rich. At the bottom end of the scale – living in a half-basement apartment – are the Kim family. At the top – almost literally, living in a sprawling, modernist apartment bathed in sun with a large private garden at the top of a hill – are the Park family. When son Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-Shik) lands a job at the Parks’ teaching English to their daughter, he quickly begins to work with sister Ki-jeong (Park So-dam) to manipulate Park Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeung) to hire each member of the family in turn in a job in the household. But from there, the best laid plans spiral firmly out of control.

The less you know about the structure and events of Parasite going into it, the more you will gain from the film. What Bong has created here is a superb medley of genres, developing from a black-comedy-heist-caper into thriller territory, with a splash of horror and lashings of intelligently subtle social commentary. This is a film for the modern age, addressing questions of class, cultural resentment, societal divisions and the damaging impact of the super-rich and super-poor living side-by-side in ways that are profoundly insightful and fundamentally universal.

Who are the parasites in Parasite? You could argue its society itself. At first it seems obvious on the surface that the Kims – living half beneath the surface of the city itself, inveigling their way into homes and roles, ruthless in acquiring their aims – fit the bill. But what about the Parks? So sheltered by money (“She can afford to be nice” says Kim dismissively of Mrs Park) they seem barely able to organise their own lives without the aid of an army of employees, placing no real value on them as people, only as extensions of their own house.

It’s all part of Bong’s skilful shift of perceptions throughout the film: the Kims are in some ways sympathetic (for the extreme poverty and desperation) but also they have no concern about hurting other people or manipulating them to get what they want. At the same time, we invest in seeing the well laid plans come to fruition, despite the impact it has on other people affected by their schemes. But as the film progresses, the innate selfishness and thoughtlessness of the Parks, their assumptions that their problems are of more concern than other people’s, that the world should revolve around them, makes them less sympathetic and the Kims more rounded and human.

Bong’s film brilliantly outlines this class war, every frame enforcing the insane split between such completely different worlds all rammed into the same city. The Parks’ apartment is a triumph of modernist design, the Kims’ flat a lightless dive with a regular tramp who pisses just outside their window. The Kims scurry to distant corners of the apartment to gain access to roving free wifi and stretch limited food supplies and their few pennies to the absolute limit. The family takes menial jobs to make ends meet, including folding a never ending pile of pizza boxes (boxes that seem to grow to dominate their flat).

At one point the camera follows the progress of the Kims as they leave the Park house and scamper, in an almost surreal series of long shots, down a never-ending parade of steps and streets, literally descending further down-and-down into the gutters of the city. It’s superb moments like this in Bong’s intricately designed film that constantly show us the divides between these people, the Parks living practically on Olympus with the Kims in Tartarus. These are problems that infect every society in the world, and the difficulty of making both rich and poor actually understand each other and find common ground to relate on are the problems we all see around us every day.

That’s even leaving aside the triumphs of Bong’s directing confidence, his mastery of tone and genre. The first half of the film is very funny – with Bong even leaning on this by having his characters drop dialogue that subtly refers to the ease with which the Kims’ plans come together – and has a delightful heist movie vibe. But the bubbling barriers between class hint at the tensions and danger that we feel lie in wait in the film, and threaten to break out. Korea is a volcano with the Kims and Parks sitting on the top, but it’s a volcano that the whole world can recognise. As Bong makes the film darker, leaner and even more menacing with hints of tragedy, it feels like the world correcting itself.

The acting is superb across the board with Song Kang-Ho hilarious and then deeply affecting as Mr Kim, a man slowly pushed beyond what he can bear. Cho Yeo-jeung is terrifically endearing and frustratingly thoughtless as the naïve Mrs Park. Park So-dam is brilliant as a super-smart Ki-jeong Kim, brilliantly manipulating left-right-and-centre. There is not a false note in the cast, the entire ensemble perfectly combining to create the class-conscious world of the film. To say too much more would be spoil it!

Bong Joon-ho’s film is Western break-through but really it’s a universal condemnation of the dangerous influence of class. And with Bong’s mastery of cinema – this is such a well directed film, both in terms of tone and every single shot contributing brilliantly to the whole – this has produced a film that feels like a very modern, prescient and profound masterpiece, a film that speaks to and almost defines the problems of the modern world. While at the same time being immensely entertaining and unpreaching. Thank goodness that 1 inch barrier came tumbling down.