"Every time I make a film, I feel like I become a new person. I die and I'm reborn again. So I feel like I know what Mickey goes through," says director Bong Joon Ho. "I've made eight films. I was Bong 1, and now I'm Bong 8."
Finding similarities between himself and Robert Pattinson's Mickey Barnes, Bong embarks on a path of rebirth in his latest film Mickey 17 — though, Mickey races past Bong by a long shot, being already on his 17th iteration. As the only "expendable" aboard the human ship colonizing the planet Niflheim, Mickey takes on doomed missions as per his job description, and, following each death, he is re-cloned again.
"Usually in my day to day life, I think of myself as Mickey 17," Bong tells Exclaim! through his interpreter Sharon Choi over Zoom. "I can be quite timid, and I have a lot of fears at the same time."
Luckily for the filmmaker, the future Bong 9 will further his story as a director, whereas Mickey 18, the clone erroneously printed before Mickey 17, dies, putting both of their lives at stake.
Based off of Mickey7, Edward Ashton's critically-acclaimed 2022 novel, Mickey 17 marks the South Korean filmmaker's third American co-production, and is the highly anticipated follow-up to the record-breaking Parasite. Finally arriving in Canada on March 7 from Warner Bros. Pictures after three separate delays due to the 2023 Hollywood labour strikes, Bong's latest venture delivers an offbeat and cynical story, challenging what it means to be human through the conventions of the science fiction genre that are as vast as space itself.
"When you say sci-fi, people normally think about futuristic elements and outer space and laser guns. And of course, those are huge appeals of sci-fi," Bong observes. "But in between all of that are the human characters that live in the world."
He continues, "I think sci-fi is more appealing when it deals with human characters that are weak and complete, and are kind of idiotic and repeat the same mistakes. I find those stories more interesting than superhero ones."
"Weak" and "idiotic" are words that aptly describe the human characters of Mickey 17, and Bong doesn't hesitate from representing how these vulnerabilities manifest themselves through violence and destruction.
"Throughout history, humans have done horrible and very cruel things to nature and to living creatures. People have destroyed so brutally so much of what is alive," Bong says.
Bong depicts humanity honestly, including all of our faults, missteps and the barbaric ways we treat each other. Across Bong's films, he contrasts these realities with moments of genuine, pure connection between his characters: a father and his daughter (Memories of Murder), a brother and his sister (Parasite), a girl and her super-pig (Okja). In Mickey 17, Bong takes this characteristic to a new level with Mickey's relationships with his clone, his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) and his lover Nasha (Naomi Ackie). Mickey 17 marks Bong's first film with a love story, critiquing human nature and dedicating itself to it all the same.
In perhaps his most humanist film, Bong explores cycles of violence as a result of late-stage capitalism and class oppression in Mickey 17. The icy, dystopian thriller Snowpiercer and the super-pigs of Okja are the film's closest relatives within the auteur's filmography, but this space odyssey prevails as its own singular experience. Characters like Mickey challenge our ideas of the quintessential sci-fi protagonist, as Bong grounds the genre to "our own reality to explore the human condition."
"I think this is the first sci-fi film in history where we get to see someone pop the pimples of the main character," Bong laughs, referring to the scientists "perfecting" Mickey's body before cloning him. "And I'm quite proud of that."
Bong 9 may not manifest in the same way that Mickey 18 does, but Bong 8 encourages us to consider human nature with a little more humility. Citing Mickey 18's headstrong and impulsive personality, Bong says with a chuckle, "I want to appear more like 18 in front of everyone. I want to appear more fierce and wild, but it never works out that way."