Following the release of his Oscar-winning hit Parasite, all eyes were on what director Bong Joon Ho would do next. Finally five years later his next project is arriving on our screens and according to our own five star Mickey 17 review , it’s a treat!
Adapting the novel Mickey7 by author Edward Ashton, director Bong’s movie follows the life of Robert Pattinson’s Mickey, a man who signs up to be an “expendable” for the human colony on the planet of Niflheim. Undertaking dangerous assignments for the colony, every time Mickey dies a new version of him is essentially printed out. However, things go awry when Mickey 17 is incorrectly assumed to be dead meaning that soon enough, two Mickeys are causing chaos.
It’s an incredibly timely feature reflecting on our relationship with the environment and technology, amidst other things. This wasn’t lost on director Bong who says in the new issue of SFX magazine , which features the 30 greatest shows of the SFX era on the cover and hits newsstands on February 26, that he made changes to Mickey’s character to help the movie feel more urgent to today’s world.
As the filmmaker explains, Mickey’s character in the novel is a “historian” and “more of an intellectual”, which is not the case in the movie as director Bong wanted to ensure that he was more relatable, especially for the younger generation. He says: “I found the potential for the character to resonate even more with contemporary young people, especially the working class, because it’s about a guy who has to die every day for his job. I feel like that in itself is such a fascinating subject.”
Director Bong continues, emphasizing that he hopes this story now resonates throughout time as the issues it explores come up time and time again: “Instead of focusing on a particular event that happened in a certain time, or a particular issue that we see on the news every day, I really wanted to focus on issues that have repeated throughout history, that surpass a particular time and place, and we always see them continue.”
Comparing it to his previous movie The Host, which followed a family attempt to rescue their loved one from a monster attacking Seoul, director Bong says Mickey 17 also centers on someone who receives “no help from the government or the system”.
With Pattinson’s Mickey being “powerless”, director Bong hopes that it allows the audience to ask important questions about the society that we live in: “But the main question is, why do we continue to see powerless groups like that when we talk so much about the future and advancements in technology? Society is supposed to be progressing, but why isn’t that getting any better? I thought that this story really lends itself to exploring that question.”
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Mickey 17 releases in theaters in the US and UK on March 7. Read more in the latest issue of SFX magazine , which will be available from Wednesday, February 26. Check out the special SFX anniversary cover to look for on newsstands below…
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