Mickey 17

It’s such a bold, adventurous, scream of a film, but its queerness ends up dampened.

There’s a bit of on-screen torture in the sci-fi black comedy Mickey 17 but the unintended one, I assume, is being forced to watch four-time Oscar nominee Mark Ruffalo and Australia’s Toni Collette mush through two of the cheesiest roles imaginable.

I feel like it has the makings of a cult classic—a dystopian space comedy/adventure with shades of Terry Gilliam.

You wonder if there wasn’t an earlier cut that was much weirder, spiky and bolder.

It would be unfair to expect Bong to make another Parasite. He hasn’t. Neither is his new movie a disaster. It might be something worse. It is passable.

A typically dynamic production, with some great visuals and that more than meets the spectacular requirements of the genre it represents without overusing digital effects or trying to forcefully demonstrate how much it cost... [Full review in Spanish]

Mickey 17 isn’t the best work from one of the current cinema’s great visionaries, but remember, mid-tier Bong is better than upper-tier work from, well, nearly everyone else.

It’s nice to see such a singular filmmaker like Bong Joon-ho get carte blanche to do whatever he wants on Warner Bros. Discovery's dime. This is how it should be.

Think Don’t Look Up meets Okja, but toned down. Mickey 17 is fun, sleek, and smart-ish—until it chooses predictability over provocation.

In Mickey 17 the chance of living again is linked to a form of slavery. The film itself ends with marks on a board rather than a photographed human scene, letters and numbers offered as a visual tribute to mortal singularity.