AFTER THE SEISMIC SUCCESS OF PARASITE, BONG JOON HO HAD THE WORLD AT HIS FEET — SO HOW ON EARTH WOULD HE FOLLOW IT UP? THE ANSWER WAS TO LEAVE EARTH ALTOGETHER — AND IN BONKERS SCI-FI MICKEY 17, IN WHICH ROBERT PATTINSON IS PITTED AGAINST HIMSELF, THE DIRECTOR TRULY GOES FOR BROKE

WORDS JOHN NUGENT

SOME CALL IT “MOVIE MAGIC”. SOME CALL IT “MOJO”. THE FRENCH CALL IT “JENESAISQUOI”. FOR DIRECTOR BONG JOON HO?

“BONG SAUCE”.

In Director Bong ’s eighth feature film, Mickey 17, Toni Collette plays a character obsessed with sauce, desperate to discover a new one on a distant planet. Her character describes the condiment as “the true litmus test of a civilisation”. It provided the perfect metaphor for how the filmmaker adapted the novel the film was based on, Edward Ashton’s Mickey7 (more on that name change later). “Edward Ashton is such a great writer,” Bong tells Empire, through his regular interpreter Sharon Choi. “The novel is such a great read.

Basically, what I tried to do was put my strange intuition onto that story. Like the sauce that Toni Collette’s character always talks about —well, I just splashed Bong sauce on the novel.”

The world has been hungry for Bong sauce. We’ve been salivating for years. It’s been half a decade since Parasite, Bong ’s riotous 2019 social satire, which became one of the most successful South Korean films of all time, sweeping up the Palme d’Or at Cannes and four Academy Awards (the first ever awarded to a South Korean film), including Best Director and Best Picture. A week after those Oscars, Martin Scorsese wrote Bong a letter of congratulations, told him, “Rest, but don’t rest too long ” —and urged him to immediately get going on his follow-up, eager to see what his unique, idiosyncratic mind would produce next. Fans have been excitedly impatient for their next Bong-hit ever since. “I know it’s been quite a long time,” he acknowledges, “but for me, I’ve never had a day off. I just kept working, non-stop.”

Mickey 17 is the result of that work, finally arriving next year. Like Ashton’s book, it tells the futuristic story of Mickey Barnes (played in the film by Robert Pattinson), a working schlub in 2054 who signs up to be an “expendable” (not the Sylvester Stallone kind): a disposable employee for a distant colonial planet, designed to take on deadly tasks, and “reprinted” with a fresh body and the same memories whenever he dies. Then, unhelpfully, Mickey 17 —the 17th iteration of the original Mickey —doesn’t die when he’s supposed to, and Mickey 18 shows up. Suddenly, there are more Mickeys than you’d find in a Disneyland gift shop.

It’s a big deal. After 2006’s The Host and 2013’s Snowpiercer, Mickey 17 marks Bong ’s long-awaited return to science-fiction, his return to the English language —and the biggest, most ambitious production of his career so far. It is also, according to its lead actor Robert Pattinson, “absolutely insane”.

For seemingly everyone who has worked on the film, this is a point of accord. Pattinson’s co-star, Naomi Ackie, simply says: “It’s wild. How many genres can we fit into this thing ?” Her castmate, Steven Yeun, agrees: “The script was kind of this fever dream. So funny and smart. I don’t even know how to describe it. It just felt like Bong.”