In the Flesh: Mickey 17

It’s not writer/director Bong Joon-ho’s tightest movie, or the best collection of performances he’s managed to get out of a cast. Mark Ruffalo and Toni Colette skew a little too broad in the roles of dictatorial expedition commander Kenneth Marshall and his wife, Ylfa, rendering Bong’s satire of the current global moment’s plague of dictatorial vanity, stupidity, and reckless strongman politicking a little tepid on occasion. Their placeless upper-class accents, the film’s muddled politics around cops and law enforcement; there are elements at work in this script that haven’t been thought through or resolved, but a slew of fantastic performances and a truly moving riff on Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind elevate Mickey 17 considerably. Even at its most ramshackle, this is a real film with serious artistic muscle behind it.

First and foremost, you have to hand it to Naomi Ackie, who plays Mickey’s (Robert Pattinson) lover, the security officer Nasha Barridge. She has the kind of wild swagger Katee Sackhoff perfected as Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica, a genuine edge that makes her unpredictable behavior feel as thrilling as it is unsettling. To make her love and devotion for the “Expendable” Mickey the emotional core of the film is a bold move, and it pays off handsomely, invoking thrillingly intimate commentary on disability, mortality, and poverty. Pattinson is as usual tremendously physically committed, enduring all sorts of contortions and pratfalls as he sputters and mumbles like some kind of latter-day Peter Lorre, concocting a pair of characters who feel at once familiar and entirely his own.

And the aliens! What a delight to see such evocative, creative creature design in such a high-profile feature. The “Creepers” as Marshall refers to them are reminiscent of water bears or insectoid musk oxen, at once off-putting and oddly charming. They have a robust physicality that makes it easy to connect to them on an emotional level, and watching the colonists and their repulsive leaders torture and kill them out of knee-jerk disgust is at the center of many of the film’s most upsetting scenes. There’s a clear parallel between Mickey and the creatures, and the sharpest moment of polemic in the entire film comes when Nasha, witnessing his torture of a baby Creeper, puts the whole picture together for herself in a blistering rant at Marshall, repeatedly calling him stupid as he turns redder by degrees. However jumbled the satirical heart of the film may be at times, it’s incredibly satisfying to watch a movie end its narrative with a heroic suicide bombing assassination of the president.