Odd Jobs

Bong Joon Ho sets a bitterly funny take on America in space.

- MOVIES / ALISON WILLMORE

PEOPLE CAN REALLY learn to live with anything. The high point of Mickey 17, Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning Parasite, is a prolonged sequence in which the title character, a hapless zhlub played by Robert Pattinson, explains how his life became a hellscape of technologically enabled immortality. Mickey Barnes is the “expendable” on a spaceship making a four-and-a-third-year journey to colonize a planet balefully named Niflheim, and his job is to perish, over and over again, sometimes by design (such as to test for viruses in the alien atmosphere), sometimes just as a side effect of how dangerous his missions tend to be. Having taken the gig to avoid an encounter with loan shark Darius Blank’s (Ian Hanmore) chain saw, Mickey managed to find himself an escape that’s potentially even more gruesome. When he dies—at times even when he’s not quite dead yet—he gets tossed into a “cycler” alongside the rest of the ship’s organic waste. Then his new body is extruded from what looks like an MRI machine and his consciousness is mapped back onto the brain. This explanatory segment, a kind of grim record-scratch, freeze-frame affair, is punctuated with hilariously brutal montages that show how this cycle becomes normalized to everyone.