I have some bad news for Robert Pattinson: He is a charming, handsome, and charismatic man.
This may come as a disappointment to the former Edward Cullen, who wore a frumpy mustache in “The Lighthouse” (2019) and turned Batman into a total bummer. Pity poor Pattinson: Despite his valiant struggle to conceal his sex appeal, he remains an actor cursed with being a star.
“Mr. Pattinson’s movie-star incandescence can’t quite be obscured by facial hair and bad lighting,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review of “Good Time” (2017). As Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” proves, limp posture, wheezing voiceovers, and swarms of CGI bugs aren’t much help either.
Bong’s provocations always have a point, whether he’s excoriating American polluters (“The Host”) or Korean elites (“Parasite”). As a social critic, he moves like a boxer, righteously punching up, but also down and sideways, daring his audience to see themselves in both his heroes and his villains.
Few moviegoers will want to see themselves in Mickey, a failed macaron salesman who enlists as an “Expendable” on an expedition to Niflheim—an ice planet that, amazingly, was not created by Dr. Seuss (“Mickey 17” is based on a novel by Edward Ashton and set in the year 2054).
Mickey, who is more akin to Arthur Dent than Luke Skywalker, is bemused to learn that Expendables are repeatedly cloned and killed. Apparently, even in the future, humans have a habit of ignoring occupational hazards (radiation, extraterrestrial viruses) alluded to in the fine print.
“Prove to me you have faith in the system!” Mickey’s supervisor demands, handing him a pistol and ordering him to shoot himself in the skull. Deadly is the weapon loaded with both bullets and metaphors for late-stage capitalism.
Just as Mickey won’t mince words when his life is at stake, Bong won’t risk losing his allegories in the subtextual netherworld. His obviousness is a matter of expediency, especially when it comes to Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), the former congressman leading the mission to Niflheim.
With an accent straight out of the outer boroughs and an army of followers in crimson ball caps, Marshall isn’t just any dictator. He’s Mark Trumpalo, futuristic dog whistles and all (Marshall hails Niflheim as “a great white planet of purity”).
While Trump gave fascism an American facelift, Marshall dispenses with all pretenses of patriotism when he declares war on the adorably gigantic crawlies (uncharitably dubbed “creepers”) populating Nilfheim, who he plans to slaughter as part of “Operation Total Extermination” (call it Project 2054).
Billowy and bursting with tentacles, the creepers also make an enemy of Mickey, who whines, “Am I not tasty enough?” when they elect not to feast on his flesh. It takes him nearly the entire movie to decide that maybe, just maybe, being left off the menu was an act of mercy.
Mercy animates “Mickey 17,” which acquits Mickey of cowardice and stupidity by transforming him into an unlikely creeper rights activist—while making Marshall so vulgar and grotesque that he seduces only the vilest of fanatics.
As nice as the Best Picture-winning “Parasite” was nasty, “Mickey 17” cobbles together a wholesome paradigm: cute aliens good, selfish every-dudes bad, raging dictators worse. Agreeing with the film’s ideals is easy. Being bored by its virtuousness is easier.
In “Parasite,” everyone endured Bong’s satirical lacerations, from the wealthy couple whose dirty talk fetishized poverty to the destitute father who killed a man for sniffing at his body odor. It’s no compliment to say that “Mickey 17” hits its mark just as squarely; cosmic MAGA is a hard target to miss.
If Bong had supercharged “Mickey 17” with excitement and emotion, no one would mind a little simplistic moralizing (just ask “Avatar” auteur James Cameron). Yet the movie has the aura of a dream rapidly losing cohesion, its grip slackening even as it attempts to tighten its hold.
An act-length opening montage builds a world without telling a story; a dinner party scene goes on longer than any meal without Wallace Shawn should; and Jung Jae-il’s piano-sprinkled score, while lovely, seems to have drifted out of an entirely different film via a wormhole.
As “Mickey 17” drags and dithers, you may wonder if Bong cast the right actors in the wrong roles. It’s easy, after all, to picture Pattinson bringing a vampiric chill to Marshall’s villainy, or Ruffalo’s natural warmth fitting snugly under Mickey’s aviator cap.
Mickey himself is mutable: When a new clone emerges from a “human printer,” his personality fluctuates, like a melody reshaped by a conductor’s baton. He can be a dope, but he can also be a dick, which may be the attraction for an actor eager to unmake and remake himself.
It’s the unmaking and remaking that strains Pattinson’s performance, injecting Mickey with a jolt of actorly desperation. Mickey is not only the main character: He’s the frenzied, eccentric performer who Pattinson is palpably hungry to become.
No one could blame Pattinson for sprinting far from the “Twilight” franchise, but that doesn’t mean he’s running in the right direction. I, for one, am pining for his portrayals of introspective sidekicks in “The Lost City of Z” (2016) and “Tenet” (2020), which revealed that he could be suave without being Cullenish.
I know, know: No one wants to be typecast. But personally, if I could play Robert Pattinson, I wouldn’t want to play anyone else.
