MICKEY 17
OUT 29 MARCH
BONG JOON-HO’S unpredictable masterpiece Parasite defied genres and defied the odds. So after winning the Best Picture Oscar with it in 2020, where does the director go next? Well, Mickey 17. The film is an adaptation of Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7 — where the extra ten Mickeys have come from, we’re not sure yet — but in the original story, the character is an ‘Expendable’, a disposable clone sent to help the humans of the future colonise new worlds. When one Mickey dies, a new version is created, with most of his memories intact.
Playing the eponymous employee is Robert Pattinson — who has form for both working with a visionary director and leading a dark, dystopian space movie with Claire Denis’ High Life. The stacked cast around him includes Toni Collette, Steven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo and Naomi Ackie. It’s a return to science-fiction for Bong Joon-ho too, who has flexed his filmmaking muscles there with the surreal Snowpiercer and satirical creature-feature Okja. All we’ve seen of Mickey 17 so far is a 30-second teaser — a square-ratio, rotating zoom into Pattinson in a cylindrical machine, doused in pale-blue light, his look to camera soundtracked by operatic strings. It’s not much to go on, but if Bong’s previous work is anything to go by, we can expect precision, tension and incisive social commentary. But, most of all, expect the unexpected.