MICKEY 17
Below: Tyrants Kenneth (Mark Ruffalo) and Ylfa (Toni Collette).
Cold comfort: Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson).
R-PAT Z GOES ALL LIVE, DIE, REPEAT
★★★★
OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 137 MINS
DIRECTOR Bong Joon Ho
CAST Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Steven Yeun, Anamaria Vartolomei
PLOT Desperate to leave Earth, Mickey Barnes (Pattinson) enlists as an ‘expendable’: a crewmember on a colony ship given the most dangerous missions, and killed multiple times.
NO - ONE IS better than director Bong Joon Ho at using the rules of genre filmmaking against his audience. In the extraordinary Parasite, he engineered a mid-film switch from social comedy to something much darker and more outrageous; in Snowpiercer it emerged that the revolutionary struggle we’d been rooting for was only a fraction of the true battle for survival. Now, in Mickey 17, he tackles space travel and the colonisation of alien worlds. If it’s a more conventional film than his best work, he still finds ways to use our expectations against us, and continually surprise us with a hero who’s just trying his inadequate best.