WTT Dispatch #39: Mickey 17 & The Beast
The future sucks
I’m a Korean-language Bong Joon Ho person. The Host, Mother, Parasite: yes. Snowpiercer, Okja, Mickey 17: no.
Bong’s latest English-language adventure opens with a snow-stubbled man ready to die in a crevasse. As he puts it, “I’m slowly turning into a meat popsicle.” Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is a non-Sylvester Stallone “Expendable,” the worst job possible on a mission to colonize a distant planet. Mickey’s hoping for a quiet death before being 3D printed anew, with his consciousness reloaded from a hard drive. Our not-terribly-bright leading man, anxious, as we all will be, to skip out on planet Earth once the permanent sandstorms begin, didn’t read the fine print on the application before signing up.
Mickey is already into his 17th iteration and, unfortunately for him, the crew accidentally prints an 18th version, thinking this Mickey won’t be back from the crevasse. You never want to meet your multiple. Arriving back in his already occupied cabin, 18 barks at 17, “I gotta kill you! You’re such a little bitch!” “But I’m you!” 17 pleads. (Aside: I’d love to know how R. Patz arrived at his ratty accent for this role.)
To pass the time while not being exposed to deadly gases, cut into quarters with a double-bladed chainsaw, or sent on doomed repair missions, Mickeys 1-17 have knocked boots with fellow traveler Nasha (Naomi Ackie). We learn his flight was precipitated by a failed macaron business back on Earth with his ne’er-do-well pal Timo (Steven Yeun), who also flits about the ship undertaking a less grueling gig than Mickey.
A failed political power couple, Kenneth (Mark Ruffalo) and Ylfa Marshall (Toni Collette), lead the mission, bringing a coalition of the desperate to a snowbound planet christened Niflheim.
No babies are allowed but the Marshalls’ plans include a “sex encouragement campaign” once they establish their colony. Upon landing, Mickey and Co. discover the main lifeforms on Niflheim are “Creepers,” slippery little creatures somewhere between musk oxen and nudibranchs. Mickey helps capture one Creeper for study by the crew, which results in millions of his kin surrounding the ship and threatening to explode the humans’ brains in skulls by making a certain sound.
The Marshalls invite Mickey to a dinner of Creeper tail sauce, which is sort of like oxtail ragu (although it’s unclear why they would want to eat a creature they refer to as a “grotesque shit gibbon”). This is a long film with several sharp sequences interspersed with somewhat repetitive passages that overemphasize the point. Ruffalo’s character in particular has moments of redundancy, making the film feel a bit bloated with blowhardiness.
It’s written and directed by the Bong Man in his signature style, here adapting Edward Ashton’s book Mickey7. Cinematographer Darius Khondji captures the squalor of the workers’ accommodations and the even greater ugliness of the Marshalls’ opulent quarters.
Many of the anti-capitalist touches don’t work well, thanks to a heavy-handed script with less subtlety than Bong’s finer works. I do acknowledge that he hits on a fair point: once the technology exists, we’ll all be like Mickey, reincarnated over and over just to go straight back to work.
2.5 out of 5 stars
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Mickey 17 is now in theaters. Rated R. Running time 2:17.
My wonderful friend AKP strongly recommended that I watch Léa Seydoux in The Beast and, just a year or so later, I got around to screening it! And boy was he right. It’s written and directed by Bertrand Bonello at a contorted confluence of Davids Cronenberg and Lynch.
The film is split between three eras and three versions of Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay), just a couple kids trying to figure things out in this crazy mixed-up world. Gabrielle lives in constant fear that “the shadow of the beast will appear.” Someone or something is coming to obliterate her, stalking her mind through past and current lives.
In the film’s present, sometime in the mid-2040s (post-environmental catastrophes and an American civil war), AI has saved humanity and is now responsible for a couple billion “useless people” who interfere with the perfection of their data-driven decisions. AI tells Gabrielle and Louis that they must “clean” their DNA, in order to get rid of their “affects.” I feel like AI has a long way to go when it can’t even accurately tell me 2023 Golden Glove winners, but I’m sure it will catch up. (In a humorous nod, the voices of the AI gods include Bonello and fellow filmmaker Xavier Dolan.)
For the first DNA cleansing, Gabrielle and Louis float back to Proustian Paris, at a rich salon filled with paintings, flirtations, and ornate flowers. Later, they tour an amazing doll factory that reveals the loveliness of handcrafted objects. Their vibe is pleasurable but rather doomy.
A trip back to 2014 is much less pleasant. Gabrielle “works” as an actress and housesitter, mostly drinking room temp Tito’s and scrolling. Her acting is done 100% against a green screen, with directorial comments like, “We’ll add the kid in post.” Another aspiring thesp, Dakota (Dasha Nekrasova), gives Gabrielle her recommendations for extensive plastic surgery, though she thoughtfully tells Gabrielle, “Don’t change your lips.” Louis appears this time as a troubling incel, 30-year-old virgin vlogger (who does not possess a good sense of lighting for his posts). He’s the saddest UC Santa Barbara Gaucho I’ve ever seen, lamenting his inability to find female companionship in spite of his expensive sunglasses and nice car. It’s a slightly ridiculous characterization, but this Louis did remind me of a college suitemate.
Between cleansing sessions, Gabrielle is shadowed by“The Doll Kelly” (Guslagie Malanda) a humanoid bot that polices/entertains her charge at a great nightclub where the theme spins through different eras every night.
Cinematographer Josée Deshaies and editor Anita Roth take a complicated timeline and mix of visual styles and create an engaging whole. Bonello turns up the madness in a final act full of wildness—the past and future collapse inward, and all kinds of stuff enters the frame, including relentless pop-up ads for a Trump presidency and jump cuts to Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers.
Seydoux’s remarkable performance makes every scene watchable from second to second. I admired the variety of unusual but heart-rending closeups Bonello employs. We see Gabrielle tearful, pleased, and, perhaps most impressively, as expressionless as a child’s doll. Seydoux’s just incredible here. The Beast captures the uneasiness of the present day—the feeling of being green screened into our own lives, awaiting quickly approaching doom.
4 out of 5 stars
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The Beast is streaming on the Criterion Channel. Not rated. Running time 2:26.