Late yesterday afternoon I tapped out a few Mickey 17 reactions from my Norwalk AMC theatre seat. I was the only one there so no concerns about iPhone glare.
(a) I’m 40 minutes into Bong Joon-ho’s long-delayed, politically fraught follow-up to the over-rated Parasite, and it’s obviously ass…dystopian primitivism, visually dreary, crudely plotted, sadistic characters, physically gross and slimy. Vomiting, brutality, chaos, writhing agony, bodies dropped into molten lava…and it’s a stab at black comedy, of course. The broad, emphatic and profoundly unfunny kind.
(b) I’m the only humanoid in the theatre so I can write all I want. This poor little futuristic allegory, shot entirely on sound stages, is an instant commercial tank. Zero want-to-see. I am the late Earl Holliman back in ‘59…”where is everybody?”
(c) “No multiples! No more re-prints!”
(d) Mickey 17’s lighting is grayish, murky, shadowy, draining. You can make out various visual details but the film is so dark you’re left wondering “why am I even watching this?”
(e) AMC concessions should offer packets of heroin as special coping additives. Sold only to customers with ID verifying that they’re over 45 years of age.
(f) Bong sure loves his creepers! Creepers are fat, insect-like life forms, cousins of Dune sand worms (thousands!), mixed in with a few large, woolly mammoth creepers, but mostly the size of bloated armadillos…despised by Mark Ruffalo’s Trump-like, dental-veneer-wearing leader but in fact benign and Ewok-like in a certain sense, and representing harm to no one.
(g) Creepers, of course, symbolize immigrants or social lessers. This is a movie offering explicit social instruction. Trumpian evil must be eradicated! Wokeys leading a revolution on a Hoth-like snow planet!
(h) RPatz is no longer the young, slender, dishy guy…he’s still thin but now on the brink of middle-age…time cuts no one a break.
(i) The menage a trois scene between Naomi Ackie and the two Pattinsons (the amiable, kind-hearted Mickey 17 and the hostile-aggressive Mickey 18) is the most interesting interlude so far. Superfluous but interesting.
(j) I’m almost at the one-hour mark. Actually the 75-minute mark. A full hour to go. I really do need to snort a little smack. Oh, you have some? Thank you…thanks so much.
(k) Poor Toni Collette….over-acting as Ruffalo’s icy-phony wife…pocketing a paycheck but doing her career no favors.
(l) Ruffalo: “You’d better be on your toes. One false move and you’re man-burger.”
(m) At least Mickey 17 ends happily. The diverse, under-40, white coat or military fatigue-wearing Bong wokeys make things right.
