Parasite director’s new film isn’t stranger than fiction — it re-creates it

In Mickey 17, Parasite director Bong Joon Ho explores a sci-fi, parallel universe, where we die to save humanity, and bow down to a failed leader. It’s accuracy to modern times shocked even him, he tells us.

Cinema has a habit of predicting the future. Stanley Kubrick invented a prototype electronic tablet in 2001: A Space Odyssey; Harrison Ford was the first person to “facetime” a lover in Blade Runner.

Likewise director Bong Joon Ho, in his eighth feature Mickey 17, has shown shocking prescience. He immerses his audience in the hostile tundra of Niflheim, four-and-a-third years into a space mission that depends on disposable human subjects called “expendables”. In one of the starkest scenes in the film, a plot to assassinate the colony’s cruelly charismatic leader — Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) — culminates with a single bullet grazing his ear.

Sound familiar?

No one could accuse the Korean director — who won a best director Oscar in 2019 for Parasite — of merely reflecting the events surrounding the recent US election, elevating one of the most iconic moments of the presidential campaign on to the silver screen: the film was written in the latter stages of the pandemic.

Bong laughs as he speaks to Review via a translator, from his home in Seoul, re-enacting the shoot sequence with a swift flick of his arm. “I was, like, really shocked when that happened,” he says referring to the failed assassination attempt last year on Donald Trump. “Especially when I re-watched the film after that incident, even I found it so strange to see the film reflect what was happening in real life.”

Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette star as the film's central antagonists.

His 2019 film Parasite bulldozed Hollywood’s iron gates to become the first foreign language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, an outstanding achievement for the self-described cinephile who from childhood devoured the works of American directors, from Steven Spielberg to Sidney Lumet, and was dubbed what Koreans call a “Hollywood kid”.

In his new film, a human delegation leaves behind a decrepit Earth, to colonise a new world.

We witness the grungetopian vision through the eyes of Mickey (Robert Pattinson), a loser so desperate to escape a ruthless loan shark on Earth that he signs himself up to a lab rat existence in Niflheim, agreeing to have his body scanned and memories archived. This human printing means he can be recycled indefinitely — hence Mickey 17 — with the aim of testing out potentially fatal hazards, the first of which is the atmosphere of the new planet.

It is a star-studded cast. Apart from Pattinson and Ruffalo, Toni Collette plays Marshall’s wife Ylfa and Mickey 17’s unscrupulous friend Timo is Steven Yeun. His love interest is Nasha (Naomi Ackie).

Based on Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey 7, the film opens in the middle of its plot, framing our fallen protagonist in a snowy ditch. Immediately Bong snaps viewers into a rolling montage of flashbacks: the demise of Earth’s old world order and the rise of an alternative political party built on an Elon Musk-aligned impulse to resettle humanity, the departure of the colonists and their arrival on Niflheim.

Mickey is one of thousands we see on a spiralling staircase, all fitted with red caps, chanting and willing to bend to the demands of the depraved Marshall. In Bong’s new world, every part of human behaviour, from eating, working and falling in love, is calculated — right down to the calories each person is welcome to consume each day.

In an accent he says was inspired by the rodent cartoon comedy Ren and Stimpy, Pattinson’s Mickey narrates the montage, explaining that each new version of himself is salvaged as discarded filth, thrown into the same incinerator with the rest of the ship’s natural waste.

“Ashes to ashes, trash to trash”, he is swallowed up and spat out again with the help of a human-sized 3D printer.

We then return to where we began — the pending death of Mickey 17, expected to be devoured by a host of the planet’s native inhabitants — woolly-mammoth like creatures vaguely dubbed “creepers”.

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Bong was propelled to international recognition with his feature film, crime thriller Memories of Murder(2003); his third film The Host (2006) was the highest-grossing South Korean film at the time of release; and he has also spanned localised drama-thrillers in Parasite and high-concept fantasy stories in Snowpiercer (2013).

Of Mickey 17, he says: “The true appeal of sci-fi lies in how much it’s able to capture the essence of our current reality, our current human condition, our politics and social conditions.”

That includes leveraging low-level slapstick, for example, to illustrate the disregard displayed towards the expendables. In one sequence, Mickey’s freshly printed body spills on to the laboratory floor after a scientist neglects to set up the gurney near the replicator, another accidentally trips over the memory downloader brick, altering Mickey’s personality in the process.

“For me, reality and comedy are inseparable,” Bong says. “It’s an essential part of our actual lives — whatever genre I delve into, I think we’re foolish beings, and things are always funny about the way we operate in the world.”

Comedy is his form of poignant psychology, a vessel for unravelling deeper ideas about society.

“A joke carries so much context of our reality and that’s how I want the audience to experience films as well,” he explains.

“They go home and start ruminating about all these ideas that the film is presenting to them.”

We witness the grungetopian vision through the eyes of Mickey (Robert Pattinson).

Bong is speaking hours after former South Korean president Yoon Suk-Yeol was carted off to jail following his short-lived declaration of martial law for the first time in 40 years. On December 4, Yoon made the snap decision, after accusing the opposition of operating as a “den of criminals” and claiming there was a North Korean conspiracy against the South Korean government.

Within six hours of the shock decree, South Korean legislators unanimously voted down the president’s order, making it the shortest period of martial law in the country’s history.

Sporting a simple black turtleneck, in a conversation that oscillates between English and Korean, Boon is quietly calm, even jovial. “I hope he, you know, has nice meals. I hope he sleeps well wherever he is,” Bong quips about Yoon.

For Bong the situation, however fleeting, bears a striking resemblance to a childhood spent under military dictatorship. Born in 1969 in Daegu, he recalls watching censored versions of American Armed Forces Network programming, including works by his cinematic inspirations — Lumet, Brian De Palma and Sam Peckinpah, among others.

In early adulthood, fascination escalated to obsession. He enrolled in Yonsei University the year following 1987’s June Democratic Struggle, a period of mass protests that spurred the torture and deaths of student activists. He was also an activist, and often smelt tear gas in his dreams due to the frequency it was deployed against student demonstrations.

In the midst of his education, the end of the dictatorship brought the nation’s first democratic administration, and with it an explosion of pop culture and cinema. Bong was squarely in the middle of the Korean New Wave of the 1980s and 1990s, marked by the rollback of film censorship and a burgeoning artistic freedom.

Director Bong Joon Ho on set filming Mickey 17

“I spent my middle school, high school and college, the most sensitive years, under a military dictatorship, so I truly know how precious this freedom is. And so, because I know how precious this freedom is, I want to relish it,” Bong says.

“I want to make sure that I am free to express everything that I wish to express. But, you know, when you make films, even if it’s not a military dictatorship, there’s sort of the unspoken and the subtle restrictions that exist in filmmaking.”

He faced one of these restrictions while making Snowpiercer, his first English language film, with fellow director Park Chan-Wook, produced by now disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein.

The standoff centred around a 25-minute sequence in which a train guard gutted a fish as a means to intimidate a band of rebels: Weinstein deemed it “action-less”.

Bong’s solution was to claim the shot meant something to his father — a fisherman — saving the sequence from the chopping floor. Now, he openly admits he simply lied to keep the shot.

Such a creative clash clouded the release of Mickey 17, initially set for March last year. A delay — publicly attributed to the Hollywood writers’ strike — raised concerns that it was not Bong who would decide the final cut. It was rumoured Warner Bros wanted a more “accessible” version of the $US150m ($235m) production: a recent report from Variety claimed the studio was much less “pumped” about the film’s prospects.

If so, it appears that once again, Bong eventually had his way.

Director Bong Joon Ho on set filming Mickey 17

“With all my films, including Mickey 17, they were all released with my director’s cut — I have maintained full creative control over my work,” he says. “They, I think, 100 per cent reflect my perspective and my creative vision, and I feel quite proud of that. I also feel quite lucky that I have managed to do that.”

He describes Mickey as his ultimate loser, a downtrodden man forced to endure experiments to craft the next superhuman evolution of the species. He constructs the character who has a sense of enduring dread — of dying once again, of engaging in the next unthinkable scenario, of having to carry the weight of humanity on his shoulders when his only real worries prior to embarking on the expedition were having enough money to eat, sleep and live.

When Review notes that in Australia these kinds of characters are called battlers, there is a brief pause in conversation. Bong appears confused, as he sounds out the phrase. His interpreter jumps in, attempting to pronounce it herself. For a moment, the conversation is lost in translation.

Then the director responds:“I think every country and culture would have their own word for the underdog … the battler.

“I’m just never really drawn to superheroes because they have so much power — any situation that they face, eventually we know that they somehow resolve it. And I just don’t find a lot of strong drama in that kind of arc.”

The drama in Mickey 17 centres on the mistaken assumption that the 17th Mickey will not survive the frozen fall into the ditch. Ultimately he does, rescued by the creepers and returns to discover Mickey 18 has been printed, in violation of the colony’s ethics on human printing, driven by the theological idea that no soul can be duplicated twice. This further complicates the situation with love interest Nasha (Naomi Ackie), as well as in the colony, especially given the new version is violent and sexually promiscuous. One version must be eliminated, but both are bound by their desire to live – or at least, stop dying.

Bong’s ability to shock stems from his desire to empower those on the lowest rungs of humanity, crafting unexpected turns that engage an audience rather than lull them into a safe space of inevitability.

“It’s actually when I see these sort of societal losers that are faced with situations that they can’t really handle that I find the best arc, and I feel like that kind of drama allows the audience to identify more with what’s happening and really sort of cheer for the characters who are in this battle.”

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Mickey 17 is visually arresting, translating Ashton’s descriptions of a hostile tundra planet into sweeping landscapes that immerse audiences in the multisensory universe. Courtesy of Bong’s reunion with Iranian cinematographer Darius Khondji, the film traverses the space between the stale, isolated walls of the spaceship and windswept, unexplored lands.

On another point central to the film — imagining how human printing is achieved — Bong leverages familiar and fearful aspects of medical imaging, like MRIs and CAT scans to imagine an artificial regeneration of life. The pairing of words “human” and “printing” are what first drew him to create the film, he says.

“I thought that concept in itself said a lot about the human condition and the surrounding world: how is this underdog character going to fight his way out of this new catastrophe? The minute I read the summarised treatment of the story, I was just instantly captivated,” he explains.

Which brings us to the subtle crux of the film. Though we’re introduced to the native inhabitants of the planet, the creepers, (who look like fluffy Christmas beetles), as assumed natural enemies to human invaders, it is ultimately they who bring Mickey17 back to safety.

“We first see these creatures with all the prejudices and biases that we would have with creatures that look the way they do. And then later on, we realise that there were so many things that we didn’t know about them that surpass our own prejudices,” Bong says.

Mickey 17 is visually arresting, translating Ashton’s descriptions of a hostile tundra planet into sweeping landscapes that immerse audiences in the multisensory universe.

While the film examines why people are so drawn to authoritarian showmen like Marshall, more cuttingly it looks at why frail humans deem themselves “superior beings” as Bong puts it, in the first place.

“(Humans think) they’re more intellectual, the more sentient beings. But we realise through these animals that that’s not always the case. And so it’s always a story about the tables turning in that sense. And that’s what I really love about stories like this.”

The director doesn’t spend too much time reflecting on how the film will be received following his biggest international success of Parasite.

“Being a filmmaker is just my profession. Making the next one is a natural process to me,” he tells us, reflecting upon a particularly brutal Oscar campaign in 2019-20.

“Even during the campaign, I would still think about my next project — I try to maintain my routine as a filmmaker, one that I’ve kept for the past 20 years. So honestly, the question of what has changed after Parasite? That question doesn’t really hold a lot of meaning for me. I don’t really think about it.”

As for the question of death, which he has spent the past four years addressing in Mickey 17, he laughs.

“I’m only human, of course I’m afraid of death,” he says.

“I just want to live long and make a lot of films.”

Mickey 17 opens in cinemas on March 7