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With Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho Offers a Bitterly Funny Take on America
Robert Pattinson plays an immortal drudge and Mark Ruffalo gives sci-fi Trump in the new film from the director of Parasite.
The high point of Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s bitterly funny follow-up to his Oscar-winning Parasite, is a prolonged sequence in which the title character, a hapless schlub played by Robert Pattinson, explains how his life became a hellscape of technologically enabled immortality. Mickey Barnes is the “expendable” on a spaceship making a four-and-third year journey to colonize a planet balefully named Niflheim, and his job is to perish, over and over again, sometimes by design (when they need to see if there are any viruses in the alien atmosphere), and sometimes just as a side effect of how dangerous his missions tend to be. In addition to 2013’s Snowpiercer, set on a train carrying the remnants of humanity on a never-ending loop around a ruined Earth, he made Okja in 2017, a sprawling satirical romp that spanned languages and continents as limberly as the ruthless megacorporation its young protagonist runs afoul of.
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