Bong Joon Ho considers himself an optimist, even if it’s not exactly obvious from his work. “It doesn’t work to deny the dark reality, to just gloss over it,” he explained to me through his go-to translator (and awards season celeb) Sharon Choi. “You need to be vicious in portraying how pessimistic our reality can be, to look at it straight on. That’s the premise of optimism — as small as that hope may be, I think that’s how we should go about it.” The fruits of this philosophy have been a slate of films that feature some of the millennium’s most perversely bittersweet endings, from a retired detective having one last maddening brush with a long-unsolved case to a pair of children discovering that life on Earth has survived the apocalypse, even if humanity may not. Bong’s characters aren’t heroes — they’re regular people trying to avoid getting pulverized in the gears of the impassive systems they have no choice but to live within. And that’s never been more the case than in his latest, Mickey 17, in which Robert Pattinson plays Mickey Barnes, a sweetnatured dimbulb whose job is basically to serve as human grease in the engine of space colonization.
As an “expendable,” Mickey gets sent off to die, again and again, on missions deemed too dangerous for the other participants on an interplanetary mission to colonize an icy planet called Niflheim. Each time he’s killed testing the alien atmosphere for viruses or absorbing massive amounts of radiation on a space walk, he’s resurrected in a printing machine in what amounts to a hilariously terrible immortal drudgery. This premise, drawn from a 2022 novel by Edward Ashton, is Bong’s bleakest yet, which is one of the reasons it’s accompanied by the closest he’s come to a happy ending (spoilers, obviously, will follow). After the 17th Mickey is presumed to have perished in an ice cave, an 18th is prematurely printed out, leading to a duplicate situation that’s supposed to result in the automatic execution of all copies. But Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), the colony’s preening despot, has another idea, and sends the clones out as sacrificial vanguards in the war he’s stoking against the planet’s indigenous population — shaggy, tentacled pill bug guys who turn out to be highly intelligent. When the Mickeys refuse to attack, and instead opt to communicate with the native creatures, their efforts to broker peace spark a rebellion amongst the humans, leading to Marshall’s death, the demolition of the printer, and a kinder, more cooperative future for the faraway community.
For Bong, this rare triumphant conclusion emerged as a counterpoint to all the cruelty that Mickey endures throughout the story. “I just felt so bad for Mickey,” he said. “He’s quite close to my son’s age. I wanted him to not be destroyed by everything. Looking back on my previous films, I felt that I was quite harsh with the characters that I created, although it may have been necessary.” Still, he was quick to point out that the film’s final sequence isn’t entirely upbeat. Preceding the ceremonial destruction of the technology that enabled Mickey’s suffering is an eerie scene that we only gradually come to understand is actually a nightmare that Mickey is having. In it, Mickey discovers Marshall’s Lady Macbeth-esque wife Ylfa, played by Toni Collette, in the process of resurrecting her husband using the same printer that brought Mickey back to life so many times, and insisting that an abusive autocrat is what the people actually crave. Bong intended the unsettling dread of this moment to linger through the cheerier scenes that followed. “I wanted to end the film with this sense of anxiety that this nightmare can always repeat itself.”
There have been plenty of new opportunities to dwell on society’s love affair with authoritarianism since Bong finished writing the script for Mickey 17 in September 2021, a year and a half after the history-making Best Picture win of his last feature, Parasite. Just in the US alone, Donald Trump was elected president for a second term. Bong’s very aware of the additional resonances that his film has taken on, though he insists that, despite certain very strong similarities, Marshall — a failed politician who accepts sponsorship from a church-corporation to lead this expedition after losing his second election — was not inspired by Donald Trump. “Mark showed me photos and news articles of a particular American governor, and I showed Mark photos of a particular Korean politician who kept losing all the elections. What we mostly talked about was that dictators can be incredibly horrible and annoying, but they have this endearing quality that they use to charm the masses.”
That charm is something Bong’s been thinking about a lot, especially in light of his own country’s complicated past with military rule. “There are people who want dictatorship. I’ve seen those people up close. In that nightmare sequence, Toni Collette at one point says, You want it, I want it, we all want it, and it’s a ridiculous thing to say, but at the same time, it’s also very real. That’s why we have these dictators using the political system to go into power. We have these dictators who are elected through voting, not through a coup.” In December, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, an attempt that was met with furious protests from the public and pushback from politicians that ultimately led to Yoon’s impeachment. “Things are now mostly back to normal, and I’m quite proud of it. But at the same time you have to ask, Why did this have to happen? Rosé is topping the billboard charts. We’re now in 2024 AD. We have to ask ourselves how and why.”
For Bong, that desire for dictatorship runs in parallel with the desire to blame ourselves for all the hardships we face, a feeling that’s embodied by Mickey, who’s convinced himself that he deserves all the brutality he endures because of something he did as a child. “The lower your self-worth, the more guilt you feel. I see so many people faulting themselves for problems that are inherent in the system or society, and it’s always heartbreaking,” Bong said. “Sometimes I find myself doing the same thing.” Still, while he wouldn’t turn down the chance to do some location scouting in space, he’d prefer to try to fix what we have rather than, like the humans on Niflheim, or certain very prominent billionaires, bet the farm on starting over somewhere new. “The energy, time, and budget spent on those pursuits will be better used to improve the environment on Earth.”
That said, the idea that his characters would agree to blow up the human printer, rejecting the idea that technological advancements are inevitable even when they’re monstrous, may be the most optimistic aspect of Mickey 17. Bong acknowledges that the idea, in his film, of tech innovations outpacing ethical guidelines has a lot in common with our current battles over generative AI. “Technology is very tempting. It provides a lot of convenience, and, especially for the people who are making money off of it, it’s a very tempting thing. A couple of years ago, there was this one AI researcher who quit his job and did this interview where he said, ‘We should all agree to stop developing AI for a couple of years and come up with actual procedures on how to use this technology and how to prevent anything from going wrong.’ But that didn’t work out. Everyone’s competing out of this anxiety and it’s going at a crazy speed. And who knows what will come out of all of this?” Bong may not make movies about heroes, but, he jokes, sometimes you need one. “We have to have John Connor.”