Didn't like Mickey 17 much!
Actually, I'll be more specific - I liked the first half of Mickey 17 quite a lot. It is very weird and funny and very, very cynical. Pattinson's performance is compellingly bizarre. The voice he does for the whole movie is fun, in my opinion. It is bad in a fun way, and it communicates the entire cartoon personality of the character all on its own. I was having a great time for the first half of the film.
The second half of the movie goes sentimental and sunny, which lost me completely. I was hoping to see the first half's cynicism transmuted into something interesting, but the movie kind of just... left it behind.
Worst of all - and this is a bit of a spoiler - the plot develops in such a way that we do not get to see much of the two clones attempting to share a life together. To me, this is the big promise of a clones movie! Killing your clone is boring, but having to live with your clone is drama. I was extremely disappointed that the characters spent a lot of time discussing how they would live together... but never actually did much of that!
The movie also has a smattering of extremely conspicuous plot holes. In the end, I found it kind of hard to like!
I wanted to write this post because I think it's worth developing an Okja Theory of Bong Joon Ho's work. Once again, he's made a film about humans having to figure out how to relate to wise, smooth, brownish-grey creatures about the size of a hippopotamus. Much of this movie felt to me like Bug Okja. I didn't like Okja much, but it's undeniable that BJH wants to tell a compelling story about sedan-sized animals. There's also this anecdote he's shared about the reason he made The Host:
While Bong was in elementary school, the family relocated to Seoul, taking up residence in Jamsil-dong by the Han River. He later attended Jamsil High School, and lived in an apartment near the Jamsil Bridge at that time. One day, while at the apartment preparing for his college entrance exam during his third year at the high school (in 1987), Bong was reportedly startled by seeing out the window what he believed to be a monster crawling up a pillar of the Jamsil Bridge and then falling into the Han River. He was already desiring to become a film director at that point in time and vowed to make a movie about a large creature living around the river someday.
(This is just the Wikipedia summary. The actual interview where he shared this story seems to no longer be available at the Wikipedia citation link.)
So it's possible that he's just Large Creature Pilled and that he will spend the rest of his life periodically creating films about the allure and mystery of enormous creatures. When I finished the movie, I was pretty disappointed, but I just shrugged and told my husband: very Bong Joon Ho! What can I say? It is simply his nature to make a movie about a creature. Maybe he deserves these creature interludes. If he can keep going back and forth between making Stuff I Like and making Large Creature Movies, I'll be completely satisfied. I like his other work well enough to put up with the creatures.