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    ‘Mickey 17’ Review: Bong Joon Ho’s Latest Dystopian Romp

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    In Bong Joon Ho’s latest dystopian romp, Robert Pattinson plays a hapless underdog whose work aboard a spaceship requires him to die, over and over.The world is at once scarily familiar and thoroughly, enjoyably loony tunes in “Mickey 17,” the latest Bong Joon Ho freakout. Bong is the South Korean filmmaker best known for “Parasite,” a ferocious 2019 comedy about class relations that spares no one, including viewers whose laughs eventually turn into gasps of visceral horror. Few filmmakers can shift moods and tones as smoothly as Bong, or have such a commensurately supple way with genre. You never know what to expect in one of his movies other than the unexpected, although it’s a good guess that, at one point, something monstrous will show up.Opening in 2054, “Mickey 17” takes place in an uneasily recognizable future that holds a cracked mirror to the present. It’s a very funny yet utterly serious story about ostensible winners and losers and about how, when money-grubbing push comes to power-hungry shove, heroes have it tough. That is the case with the title schlimazel, Mickey, a guy with a confused smile and a kick-me sign on his back. Played with soulful haplessness by Robert Pattinson, Mickey is a nice, not especially sharp guy who, having signed up with a space expedition, is in the wrong place at the wrong time for foolish reasons. He’s to blame, sort of.Bong wrote the screenplay, adapting it from Edward Ashton’s 2022 science-fiction novel “Mickey7.” The science in the movie is fairly minimal as such futuristic stories go; it includes a souped-up printer that Mickey becomes intimately familiar with during his wiggy adventures in inner and outer space. Following a disastrous business venture, he and his feckless friend, Timo (Steven Yeun), have fled Earth to work on a spaceship run by Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a congressman turned megalomaniacal cult leader whose acolytes like red hats. Marshall and his wife, a scary slinkstress, Ylfa (Toni Collette), plan on colonizing what he believes is an uninhabited new world, a snowy white “planet of purity.”By the time you have entirely grasped what Marshall and Ylfa are up to, who and what they are, the ship is on the planet, and Mickey has died — 16 times, to be exact — in his role as the ship’s “Expendable.” Used to test viruses and other threats, Mickey undergoes brutal trials, and ends up dying on the job only to be reprinted in externally identical form. As with any software update, there are bugs, along with routine mishaps. When the movie opens, Mickey 17 has just plunged into a planet crevasse. Timo, who’s zipping nearby, isn’t interested in rescuing Mickey, who is, after all, disposable. All Timo wants to know is, What’s it like to die?It’s a question that others on the ship like to ask Mickey, which adds to the melancholia that hangs over this movie even during its bounciest, most carnivalesque moments. As he does, Bong takes a while to fully show his hand. Instead, working swiftly, he introduces this future with characteristic visual flair, flashes of beauty, spasms of comically couched violence and a palpable warmth that attenuates the more abject turns. He also gives Mickey a shipboard romance with Nasha (a lovely Naomi Ackie), a security agent who becomes his protector, an affair that heats up the story. Nasha is normal, just and true, and she helps humanize Mickey. Bong often plays Mickey’s deaths for laughs, but he wants you to feel them.And you do feel them, at times deeply, amid the flashbacks, pratfalls, peppy edits, roving camerawork and the images of one after another Mickey being dumped like garbage. These scenes can be rightly grim, yet they have a queasily amusing kick because of Bong’s lightness of touch and Mickey’s deadpan fatalism. One of Bong’s undersung strengths is that he’s great with actors, and the work that he and Pattinson do with the character’s voice and silent-clown physicality is crucial to pulling off the movie’s tonal expansiveness. Mickeys come and go, but the one you come to know best is No. 17. He has a distinct nasal whine (shades of Adam Sandler) that, as humor gives way to anguish, becomes a clarion call for decency.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The ‘Parasite’ Director Brings Class Warfare To Outer Space

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      Bong Joon Ho sent a text message a bit past noon, naming a subway station in Seoul and asking me to meet him there at 7 p.m. In his imperfect English, he signed off with a cryptic tease: “I’ll show you some ordinary but strange area. See you in front of GATE No. 4.”It was the summer of 2023, and I’d gone to South Korea to watch Bong work on his seventh feature film, “Mickey 17,” a sci-fi action-adventure featuring Robert Pattinson, Mark Ruffalo, Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie and Toni Collette. Bong — or Director Bong, as he’s known among Koreans and collaborators — is his country’s highest-profile filmmaker, at home and abroad. His last movie, “Parasite” (2019), won four Academy Awards, including best picture and best director.Bong is drawn to confrontational, tone-scrambling material. “Irony and paradox,” he told me at one point, are “the driving force for me when I make films.” His style is to deploy genre conventions while subverting them in audacious and ingenious ways. As he once put it to a Korean interviewer, “Whatever genre I choose, I intend to destroy it.”His movies are also fun, which explains why Bong has enjoyed a long run not only of critical acclaim but also commercial success. His 2006 monster-movie deconstruction, “The Host,” broke all Korean box-office records. Among its champions is no less of a genre-subverter than Quentin Tarantino, who likened Bong to “Spielberg in his prime.” “Parasite,” a home-invasion deconstruction, earned even more, planting him firmly in the pantheon of bankable contemporary auteurs.Originally conceived for the stage, “Parasite” was a tightly focused Korean-language suspense story with an achingly ambiguous ending, no supernatural creatures and, unless you count its operatically grisly climax, zero action sequences. “Mickey 17” is a different beast entirely. Based on a 2022 novel by Edward Ashton, called “Mickey7,” the film is about a desperate loser named Mickey Barnes, played by Pattinson, who signs onto the crew of a spaceship as part of a campaign of intergalactic colonization. He’s tasked with the crushing work of an “Expendable”: His memories are uploaded so that his consciousness can be installed, as often as needed, into endlessly reprintable replicas of his body. These come in handy, because his job includes gulping down lung-liquefying airborne viruses and bathing himself in radiation, among other torturous and fatal work. At its core, Bong said, “it’s a story about working-class people. And I was attracted by the idea that his job is dying.”Social stratification has been the dominant theme in Bong’s films since he was a student. Whether he is working in more-realist registers or more-fantastical ones, he situates his heroes within superstructures of class and power that determine, and frequently deform, their lives. “Quite many of my characters are confused,” he said. “They’re in the middle of a situation and don’t know what’s going on. It’s sad and comic at the same time.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At the Berlin Film Festival, Anxious Movies for Dark Times

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      At the Berlin International Film Festival, the onscreen mood was downbeat, but the program still held some gems.The skies are typically gray and gloomy at the Berlin International Film Festival, but this year’s edition, which runs through Sunday, began with snow for days. The wintry weather gave the event — known as the Berlinale — a magical glow at first, but it wasn’t enough to keep the demons at bay. Looming over the festival were anxieties over the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, as well as the upcoming German elections. The films also radiated an air of shame, despair and powerlessness, asking: How to trust ourselves to make the world better when we’ve already screwed up so spectacularly?Tom Tykwer’s visually dazzling, but comically misguided liberal drama, “The Light,” opened the event last week, submitting festivalgoers to 162 minutes of angst and attrition (and one too many “Bohemian Rhapsody” needle drops) about a German family spiritually cleansed by their Syrian housekeeper.For many of us on the ground, however, the first real epic-of-interest was the “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho’s science-fiction caper “Mickey 17” — a film that induces nervous laughter about society’s abysmal moral standards. In this high-concept action movie with a zany dark heart, labor exploitation hits a new low when workers, or at least their physical forms, become literally disposable. Robert Pattinson stars as one such “expendable,” a dopey spaceman whose co-workers treat him like a lab-rat, knowing that his body can be reprinted.A scene from “Mickey 17.”BerlinaleBong’s bids at timeliness are staler than usual. (Mark Ruffalo plays a grandstanding demagogue whose followers wear red caps.) But the film’s dull political edge doesn’t diminish the joy ride’s momentum, nor the flashes of genuine weirdness that keep us guessing. If, god willing, superhero movies are destined to go the way of the dodo, “Mickey 17” is a reminder that directors like Bong keep the dream of the blockbuster alive.President Trump’s ramped-up campaign of mass deportations infiltrated my viewing of Michel Franco’s “Dreams,” a competition entry that filled me with much ambivalence, but also moved and infuriated me. This intentionally provocative psychodrama by one of Mexico’s most divisive directors sees Jessica Chastain as a tightly wound philanthropist from San Francisco who has a tempestuous relationship with an undocumented ballet dancer from Mexico — whom we first see, like the survivor at the end of a brutal horror film, emerging from a van full of smuggled migrants.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film Club’ Review: Cinema Education

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      This documentary is both a look at a small, obsessive film club that formed in the early ’90s in South Korea and an origin story of the director Bong Joon Ho, who was in the group.Every filmmaker, including the great ones, starts somewhere — even if that means making a low-rent stop-motion short called “Looking for Paradise” that’s about a stuffed gorilla searching for freedom while fighting a caterpillar that emerged from its fecal matter. That was how a young, student Bong Joon Ho made his debut, a saga detailed in “Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film Club,” a charming documentary about a cohort of South Korean cinephiles formed in 1992.Before becoming one of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary auteurs (through movies including (“Parasite,” “Okja” and “Snowpiercer”), Bong found an education as part of this tiny, makeshift film academy made up of graduate students and other film lovers. The documentary, directed by Lee Hyuk-rae (who was part of the group), gathers the club members to reminisce about these early days, when they’d congregate in a yellow-painted office to watch and study bootleg VHS copies of art-house movies.Their interests were representative of what was then a larger, budding wave of South Korean cinephile culture that would produce major talent, including Bong and the filmmaker Park Chan-wook, though most of the other members of this particular group went on to have careers outside of film.The documentary carries a couple of interesting insights into Bong’s own origins: There’s a surprisingly profound kernel of emotional acuteness in his amateur debut, along with an early instance of the motif of basements that shows up in many of his later films. But the doc mostly amounts to a sweet nostalgia trip about a niche group of obsessive young people. It’s also an ode to young adulthood itself: For most of the group, latching on to cinema was simply a means of finding a community, and themselves.Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film ClubNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Cannes Cameraman Explains How He Shoots Standing Ovations

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      Jean-Baptiste Cortet explains what he focuses on and why (partly to goad the audience) when he’s filming those premiere close-ups.CANNES, France — Imagine a cameraman pointing his camera directly at you.Now imagine it moving closer to your face. No, even closer than that. So close you could almost forget that this moment is shared not just between you and the cameraman, but 2,300 other people who surround you, applaud you and are hanging on your every gesture.That’s what it feels like when you’re caught in one of the Cannes Film Festival’s infamously elongated standing ovations, in which each twitch of your face — whether from pride, embarrassment or boredom — is captured by the cameraman and broadcast to the Grand Théâtre Lumière’s movie screen, where your supersized reactions play instead of the closing credits.Even for celebrities, the scrutiny of the Cannes cameraman can be a lot to withstand. This week, Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba teared up in front of the camera after the premiere of “Three Thousand Years of Longing”; last year, long into a sustained ovation for “Annette,” the cameraman panned to a cast member, a bored Adam Driver, as he lit a cigarette. In 2019, as the applause for “Parasite” refused to die down after several minutes, director Bong Joon Ho was even caught on camera leaning over to his lead actor and complaining, “I’m hungry.”We are on Minute 5 of the ANNETTE standing ovation and Adam Driver has begun smoking a cigarette pic.twitter.com/F56r0W0nGL— Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) July 6, 2021
      The mechanics of the Cannes standing ovation have long fascinated civilians, but as more clips from those moments go viral on social media, it’s the sustained close-ups that have begun to spur the most debate. “The Cannes standing ovation camera is simply too much to watch,” said one Twitter user, evidently suffering from secondhand embarrassment. “I would honestly just melt if it was on me.”According to Jean-Baptiste Cortet, it isn’t easy to be the one wielding the camera, either. “I can see how uncomfortable they are, and I feel it,” Cortet said. “I would not want to be in their spot in this moment!”Cortet, an excitable, apple-cheeked Parisian who met me on a Cannes terrace wearing a Jeff Koons T-shirt and cuffed bluejeans, has spent three decades working for Cannes and began filming the festival’s standing ovations seven years ago. And yes, he knows what people think. “I saw on the internet that people were making fun of it!” he said, ready to clear the air: He isn’t nearly as close to those celebrities as it looks.By way of demonstrating, Cortet positioned me against the terrace railing and backed a few paces away while brandishing an imaginary camera. “I make sure that I’m as far away as I can, and I zoom in to do the close-up,” he told me, speaking through a translator. He said he would never dare put his camera lens just inches from someone’s face: “Comedians hate that. Especially actresses!”In many ways, Cortet is the standing ovation’s secret weapon. The audience does not simply clap into a vacuum for several minutes: They are guided and goaded by Cortet, who continually searches for new things to shoot and broadcasts those close-ups onto the big screen behind him.“The cameraman has the responsibility to carry the emotion of the room,” Cortet said. And those emotions can run very high at Cannes, especially when the film ends and the lights first go up. “This is the time when I’m able to catch an embrace, a discussion between two people — I can navigate through these different moments,” Cortet said. “I like it more when it’s messy.”A few minutes into those candid moments, Cortet locks into a routine: He will go down the row of actors, filming each one for a surprisingly sustained amount of time, a phase he calls “the eye line.” This is the bit that often extends the standing ovation to record-breaking levels, especially if there’s a large ensemble cast and a famous director present. Then, once everyone has had a solo moment in front of Cortet’s camera, they can pair off in new combinations, a phase that pads the ovation stopwatch even more.And just over Cortet’s shoulder at most of the premieres is the festival director, Thierry Frémaux, who pushes the cameraman even closer to the stars while exclaiming, “Close-up! Close-up!” Shooting the eye line is “a mix of me feeling the emotion and knowing how to film it, and Thierry knowing who to aim at,” Cortet said, adding with a laugh, “I prefer when I’m alone.”Some Cannes regulars, like Spike Lee and David Lynch, are now familiar with Cortet and wink or nod when he goes in for the shot. “These directors, who are usually on the other side of the camera, they recognize the difficulty,” he said. “It’s a pleasure for me to see they have empathy for the situation.”But not every director can stand it. During the ovation for “The French Dispatch,” Cantet moved into the aisle to block Wes Anderson when he noticed the auteur eyeing the exits.“I have to refrain the directors from leaving!” he said. “They want to trespass past me.”Cortet doesn’t usually enter the theater until 10 minutes from the ending, so it’s sometimes difficult for him to pick up on how well the film has gone over until the crowd leaps from their seats. “I don’t feel the same emotions as the people in the room,” he said. “I don’t understand the why’s of this raw moment.”Still, he’s a quick learner. At the premiere of “Armageddon Time,” when the director James Gray burst into tears, Cortet got a little misty, too.“It happens many times: I feel such a strength of emotion carry to me that tears fall from my eyes,” he said. “And then I can’t see anything because it’s too blurry! More

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      Bong Joon Ho and Ryusuke Hamaguchi on Oscar Surprise ‘Drive My Car’

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      The Korean filmmaker and the Japanese director have long admired each other. The two explain why Hamaguchi’s best-picture nominee resonates.In January 2020, just weeks before his film “Parasite” would make Oscar history, the director Bong Joon Ho was in Tokyo doing a magazine interview. By that point in what had become a very long press tour, Bong had dutifully sat for dozens of profiles, but at least this one offered a little bit of intrigue: Bong’s interviewer was Ryusuke Hamaguchi, a rising director in his own right.For Bong, a fan of Hamaguchi’s films “Asako I & II” and “Happy Hour,” this was a welcome chance to mix things up. “I had many questions that I wanted to ask him,” Bong recalled, “especially since I’d been doing many months of promotion and I was very sick of talking about my own film.”But Hamaguchi would not be deterred. He was a man on a mission — “pleasantly stubborn and persistent,” as Bong remembered him — and every time a playful Bong tried to turn the tables and ask the younger director some questions about his career, Hamaguchi grew ever more serious and insisted that they speak only about “Parasite.”“I really wanted to know how he made such an incredible film, even though I knew how tired he was of talking about ‘Parasite,’” Hamaguchi said. “I felt sorry for him, but I still wanted to ask him questions!”Now, two years later, Bong has finally gotten his wish: The 43-year-old Hamaguchi is the man of the moment, and Bong is only too happy to jump on the phone and discuss him. Hamaguchi’s film “Drive My Car,” a three-hour Japanese drama about grief and art, has become the season’s most unlikely Oscar smash, receiving nominations for best picture and international film in addition to nods for screenplay and directing.Hidetoshi Nishijima, left, and Toko Miura in “Drive My Car.”Bitters EndThose happen to be the same things “Parasite” was honored for two years ago, when that South Korean class-struggle thriller collected four Oscars and became the first film not in the English language to win best picture.Explore the 2022 Academy AwardsThe 94th Academy Awards will be held on March 27 in Los Angeles.A Makeover: On Oscar night, you can expect a refreshed, slimmer telecast and a few new awards. But are all of the tweaks a good thing?A Hit: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” is the season’s unlikely Oscar smash. The director Bong Joon Ho is happy to discuss its success.  Making History: Troy Kotsur, who stars in “CODA” as a fisherman struggling to relate to his daughter, is the first deaf man to earn an Oscar nomination for acting. ‘Improbable Journey’: “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” was filmed on a shoestring budget in a remote Himalayan village. In a first for Bhutan, the movie is now an Oscar nominee.“‘Parasite’ pushed open that very heavy door that had remained closed,” Hamaguchi told me through an interpreter this week. “Without ‘Parasite’ and its wins, I don’t think our film would have been received well in this way.”Called a “quiet masterpiece” by the Times critic Manohla Dargis, “Drive My Car” follows Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a theater director grappling with the death of his wife, as he mounts a production of “Uncle Vanya” in Hiroshima. The theater company assigns him a chauffeur, Misaki (Toko Miura), who ferries him to and from work in a red Saab while holding back vast emotional reserves of her own. Though Yusuke at first resents Misaki’s presence, a connection — and then a confession — is finally made.“There are many directors that are great at portraying characters, but there is something peculiar and unique about Hamaguchi,” Bong said via an interpreter by phone from Seoul. “He’s very intense in his approach to the characters, very focused, and he never rushes things.”And though that unhurried approach can result in a long running time, Bong felt that the three-hour length of “Drive My Car” only enriched its eventual emotional impact.“I would compare this to the sound of a bell that resonates for a long time,” he said.Perhaps it’s fitting that the film’s awards-season journey has been slowly building, too. Unlike “Parasite,” which rocketed out of the Cannes Film Festival after winning the Palme d’Or, the intimate “Drive My Car” (adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami) emerged from Cannes last summer with a screenplay trophy and little Oscar buzz. But after critics groups in New York and Los Angeles both gave their top film award to Hamaguchi, the movie’s profile began to steadily rise.From left, Choi Woo Shik, Song Kang Ho, Chang Hyae Jin and Park So Dam  in “Parasite.”NeonStill, the road to Oscar is littered with plenty of critical favorites that couldn’t go the distance. When I asked Hamaguchi why “Drive My Car” had proved to be his breakthrough, the director was at a loss.“I honestly really don’t know,” Hamaguchi said. “I want to ask you. Why do you think this is the case?”I suggested that during the pandemic, it affects us even more to watch characters who yearn to connect but cannot. Even when the characters in “Drive My Car” share the same bed, the same room or the same Saab, there’s a gulf between them that can’t always be closed.Hamaguchi agreed. “We are physically separated and yet we’re able to connect online,” he said. “It’s that thing of being connected and yet, at the same time, not.”To illustrate what he meant, Hamaguchi recalled that 10 years ago, while working on a documentary about the aftermath of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, he traveled through eastern Japan interviewing survivors. As he lent those people a camera and his trust, deeply buried thoughts came spilling out of them.“After the interviews, I wrote out the words, and I realized that the ones that really shook me were the words that were quite normal or ordinary,” he said. “They were things that perhaps these people had already thought but had never thought to verbalize until that moment.”The same is true when it comes to the “Drive My Car” characters, whose internal struggles can only reach the level of epiphany when they find someone to confide in.“It’s possible that when the characters say what they’re thinking, the audience could think, ‘Oh, they didn’t actually know this?’ But it’s about the journey of being able to get to a place to verbalize that, and for that journey to happen, it’s because someone is there to witness it,” Hamaguchi said. “Somebody being there to listen has an incredible power.”And Hamaguchi wouldn’t mind some company himself, if only to help him process all those Oscar nominations. When I spoke to him last week, he was quarantining in a Tokyo hotel after returning from the Berlin Film Festival. “I haven’t seen anyone, so no celebration for me,” he said.As the Oscar nominations were announced on Feb. 8, Hamaguchi was flying to Berlin; when the plane landed hours later, he turned on his phone and was flooded with text messages. Even now, recounting the story, he remains in a state of disbelief.“To be honest, I don’t think I’ll feel like all of this is real until I’m actually at the awards ceremony,” he said. “No matter how many congratulations I get, it’s hard to believe, especially when I’m confined to a narrow, small hotel room. Perhaps when I’m at the awards ceremony and I see directors like Spielberg there, reality might kick in.”Bong, center, onstage at the Oscars when “Parasite” won best picture in 2020.Noel West for The New York TimesBong was less gobsmacked by Hamaguchi’s nominations. “I knew ‘Drive My Car’ was a great film, and I didn’t find it surprising,” he said. “And since the academy lately has been showing more interest in non-English films, I expect that the film will do well at the awards.”His own Oscar ceremony was a whirlwind experience — “I can’t believe it’s been two years already,” Bong mused — but he declined to offer advice to Hamaguchi on how to navigate the night.“I’m sure he will do well,” Bong said. “He is someone who is like an ancient stone — he has a very strong center.”Instead, Bong extended a request. When they first met in Tokyo, and again last year during a panel discussion at the Busan Film Festival in South Korea, there wasn’t much time for the two men to hang out. “So this year, I hope we will be able to get together either in Seoul or Tokyo and have a delicious meal,” Bong said. And after the Oscars, surely they would have plenty of notes to compare.Hamaguchi was eager to accept the invitation. “I’m truly delighted to hear that,” he said, though he cautioned that Bong might not like the topic of dinner conversation: “I would really love to keep asking questions about how he makes such amazing films. I want to keep asking him until he’s sick of me asking!” More

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      On the Scene: Cannes Film Festival 🇫🇷

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      On the Scene: Cannes Film Festival 🇫🇷Kyle BuchananReporting from the French RivieraThe standing ovation for “Annette” — an esoteric musical with songs from the band Sparks — lasted so long (over five minutes!), Adam Driver and Leos Carax, its director, both lit up cigarettes in the theater. More