After five years of delays and waiting, The Stone Roses released Second Coming in 1994.
The difficult follow-up to a defining masterpiece is a tale as old as time; Second Coming couldn’t match the psychedelic brilliance of 1989’s self-titled.
How could it? The album started with an 11-minute long track, and the album overall was half an hour longer than their concise debut album.
Second Coming has developed a cult following in the years since – mostly a “it wasn’t that bad and it has some good tunes” fandom – and this lede is a roundabout way of saying that Mickey 17, the new film from Bong Joon-Ho, is his Second Coming.
In early 2020, the South Korean auteur made history as his film Parasite became the first-ever foreign language film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, with the film also taking home awards for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
Director Bong’s ascendancy came as little surprise for people who were paying attention; his South Korean films, alongside his colleague Park Chan-Wook, revealed that Korean cinema was among the most dynamic and exciting cinema industries of the modern day.
Mickey 17 marks Bong Joon-Ho’s third English language film, following 2013’s Snowpiercer and 2017’s Okja.
Mickey 17 is similar to last year’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga insofar as both films are about a director coming off a decade-defining classic and trying to have it both ways by giving the fans what they expect and still trying to make a film that is personal to them.
With a $120 million dollar budget to play with and big stars like Robert Pattinson and Mark Ruffalo at his disposal, the South Korean auteur literally shoots for the stars with this sci-fi comedy.
The film has a classic Bong Joon-Ho set-up: rampant consumerism has rendered the earth uninhabitable, and people want to get off earth by any means necessary.
Robert Pattinson is one such person and signs up for an off-world voyage to a distant planet despite knowing the inherent risk and danger involved.
The mission is led by Mark Ruffalo, a mix of Zapp Brannigan from Futurama and Donald Trump, promising a world of plenty and innovation.
As part of the deal, Pattinson’s Mickey dies again, again and again but not to worry, they can just reprint him, consequence-free, memories intact.
Fans of Star Trek or Bradbury will find a lot to like here; Mickey 17 has a lot of fun with the idea of “if you bring someone back from the dead, are they still the same person” philosophical quandary.
At the height of his Twilight stardom in the early 2010s, Pattinson made the choice to work with Canadian auteur David Cronenberg; his performance in the 2012 film Cosmopolis is the genesis of the “Robert Pattinson, handsome weirdo” arc, which came to fruition with The Batman.
Robert Pattinson is one of the great movie stars of his generation and yes, does big-budget fare like this, Tenet, and The Batman, but he also gets films by Cronenberg, James Gray, and Claire Denis made at a studio level.
In this role, we get the best of both worlds; Pattinson gets to be the marquee idol you can put on a poster or the side of a bus, and he still gets to be a loveable oddball in a dual role.
In press for the film, it has been revealed that Pattinson based his performance partially on Ren and Stimpy as well as Steve-O and Johnny Knoxville from Jackass which is a sign that’s hes a millennial with impeccable taste in media.
Both the director and star are working on the same wavelength here, and their interplay makes the film a joy to watch at times.
The majority of the film’s comedy comes from Pattinson’s oddball performance, but the real laughs come from Mark Ruffalo.
Like Pattinson, Ruffalo has the soul of a character actor trapped in the body of a marquee idol.
In this role, Ruffalo eats the scenery as a fun pastiche of Bill Clinton (with an accompanying Hilary by his side, played by a batty Toni Collette) and Donald Trump.
Ruffalo has implied in press for the film that the American president was his inspiration for the role, and in the film, it isn’t merely subtext; it’s text.
Starship Troopers was incredibly unsubtle in its satire in 1997, and people didn’t understand it then; Bong Joon-Ho is practically shouting from the rooftops in 2025, telling the audience he’s taking the mickey.
Squid Game has made the South Korean brand of anti-capitalism hip to a global audience, and Mickey 17 is uniquely timed to bring Bong Joon-Ho’s brand to the masses.
The film is at its best when it’s in classic Bong Joon-Ho territory, where he picks apart and critiques the folly of a system; there is a deft comedic touch to the film which brings films like Milos Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball or Jean Luc-Godard’s Weekend to mind.
The big influence looming over the film is the works of Dutch director Paul Verhoeven; Mickey 17 is indebted to the likes of Total Recall and Starship Troopers.
With the world-building first-rate and Jung Jae-il’s score a highlight, it’s now up to the plot to bring it all home.
This is where the film sadly falls flat.
At two hours and 20 minutes, the film has the structure and rhythm of a traditional blockbuster, but it weirdly runs out of fuel in the third act.
The film builds to a special effects-laden climax, which feels somewhat shoehorned in and at odds with what the film has been going for up until that point.
This is where the Second Coming metaphor comes back in; Bong Joon-Ho tries to have his cake and eat it too; he delivers the brilliant world-building he’s known for but struggles when he’s tasked with executing the punchline.
Mickey 17 has one subplot too many, and you really feel the film tying itself in knots.
The film is like going to a restaurant and asking for a cheeseburger and chips; you place the order, the cheeseburger is presented on a silver platter, the ghost of Cary Grant personally hand delivers you the chips, and you’re served a drink in the Holy Grail itself.
We’re not going to start knocking down films for being too overambitious – god knows we’d much prefer Hollywood make this kind of messy, imperfect project than a focus group, design by committee dross superhero movie – but you just want Mickey 17 to take a breath and focus.
Mickey 17 is the weakest English-language film from Bong Joon-Ho, but we’d take a mid-tier film from this guy than literally anything else out in the cinema or streaming right now.