Parasite, 2020’s Best Picture winner, is director Bong Joon Ho’s second-best film about the depredations of capitalism.

Don’t get me wrong: Parasite’s a solid movie, particularly through the first 90 or so minutes. Bong does an impeccable job of introducing us to the loutish family at the heart of the film, a pack of grifting ne’er-do-wells who have never found work they couldn’t shirk. It’s not that the Kim family is stupid—the son is a solid enough English tutor; the daughter is skilled at the fine art of bullshitting parents desperate to help their kids—or that they’re physically infirmed (the mother won a silver medal in the hammer throw). They’re just kind of lazy and resentful of their station in life, annoyed and insulted that anyone would notice their malodorous nature.

Watching them put their talents to relieving fellow working-class stiffs of their jobs by tricking a wealthy family into hiring all of them in different household gigs is like watching a Korean version of The Sting; you love to see a good grift come together, even if the grifters themselves are awful people. And the second act reveal of Parasite is shocking while still making perfect sense, the grifters facing the potential of comeuppance at the hands of another family lacking in solidarity with their working-class brethren. As a metaphor, though, the film falls apart at the end: These people aren’t preyed upon by capitalism but their own poor life choices and lack of impulse control.

Snowpiercer, on the other hand, is perfect, in no small part thanks to its nearly idiotic simplicity. To wit: Capitalism has classes; trains have classes; what if we represented the entirety of the human experience by putting the last remnant of humanity on a train and seeing what would happen if the lower orders in the rear led an assault on the swells in first class. The whole thing is almost transcendently silly—the train, the Snowpiercer itself, runs constantly on a route around the world carrying the final humans through a snow-ridden wasteland; the steerage in the rear survives on blocks of bug meat; decadent youths in the front numb themselves with drugs and drink through the end of the world—and it works because of, not despite, that. If you make your metaphors broad enough and keep your film moving at high speed, no one can successfully knock out enough ties to derail the enterprise.

Share

And this is the real reason Snowpiercer works: It’s both fantastically demented in its set design and costuming and a keenly shot action-adventure movie, as though Terry Gilliam wrote and shot a remake of The Raid. From martial arts action to gun battles through and across train cars to knife fights in steam rooms, Snowpiercer’s middle 40 minutes are about as relentlessly awesome as anything released in the 2010s. The movie takes a little while to get going and it lingers a bit too long at the end, but when it hits its stride it sprints like a maglev through open terrain.

It’s worth noting, briefly, that this is also why Bong’s The Host works. Despite being a spectacularly silly movie—the inciting incident involves a U.S. Army doctor demanding jars of poison be poured down a drain into the Han River for reasons that can only be summarized as cartoonish villainy—the film works at a very basic level as a monster movie. A kaiju has stolen a little girl; the little girl’s family wants to get her back; and the family must fight both the monster and government forces to accomplish that. Simple, efficient stuff. If your dumb idea burrito comes wrapped in a tasty genre tortilla, audiences will wolf it down. As they should. They are there to be entertained, after all.

If you’d rather stay in this weekend, Peter, Alyssa, and I have some reading recommendations on this week’s bonus Across the Movie Aisle.

Share

Which brings me to Mickey 17, Bong’s first major theatrical release since Parasite swept through the Oscars. In theory, Mickey 17 feels like it’s perfectly situated for Bong to continue the capitalist critiques that run through Snowpiercer, his anti-factory farming parable Okja, and Parasite. Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is an Expendable on a mission to colonize a distant planet; his kind is so titled because they are given tasks that will lead to their deaths, such as dangerous missions to fix things in deep space or to develop a nerve agent from diseases found on their new home of Niflheim.

Each iteration of Barnes is given a new number after he dies, meaning that 16 Mickeys have died before the film begins with Mickey 17 on the floor of a crevasse, waiting for death at the hands (well, mandibles) of the indigenous worm-like Creepers. Except, whoops, he doesn’t die; the Creepers take him home. Where, whoops, he gets home to find Mickey 18 (Pattinson) in his bed. Whoops, because to be a “multiple” is to incur not only instant execution for both copies but also the deletion of their mind from the whole system for permanent death. The people of the not-too-distant future don’t much care for multiples, given questions of souls and the fact that the most famous multiple turned out to be a psychotic murderer.

Again: The setup here seems ripe for a critique of capitalism’s tendency to use the blood of the worker as grease for its wicked gears. One can imagine a version of this movie in which the deaths are mined for humor and/or terror. But in the film as it exists, it’s mostly just … Mickey sitting around waiting to die from disease or radiation before a new copy spits out of the machine. We’re given nothing to feel, and I get the sense that we’re given nothing to feel because most of our feelings are meant to be focused on revulsion at the sight of Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a politician voted out of office whose red-hat-wearing minions have decided to follow him and his ditzy model of a wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette) on their quasi-religious journey to Niflheim.

Now. I don’t want to jump to conclusions here. I don’t want to overread things. But I get the inkling that Marshall—with his slavish followers in the red, mottoed gear; with his overwrought mannerisms and boorish sensibility; with his dopey obsession with purity—may be intended as a slight critique of one Donald J. Trump. And look: I hate Donald J. Trump as much as the next guy. (More, probably; one doesn’t sign up with The Bulwark if you feel mere annoyance at the sight of that stubby-fingered muttonhead. I think I’m getting the derangement, Pop.) But the movie suffers badly from this whole setup; whereas the satirical tracks of Snowpiercer were broad, the focus of Mickey 17 is simply too narrow to support the weight of the rest of the film.

Leave a comment

Unlike Snowpiercer or The Host, Mickey 17 doesn’t really work on its own terms as a genre exercise. Bong, who wrote the adaptation in addition to directing the film, has jettisoned the most interesting ideas and elements of Edward Ashton’s book, Mickey 7, among them the idea of space colonization as a response to humanity evolving into a post-scarcity society where one of the biggest problems is, really, boredom. (The book is actually quite interesting; the colony and space mission represent a functionally socialist society, with food being the only currency and everyone earning the same amount, absent punishments for misbehavior. That Bong read this and tried to force it into a general critique of corporatized religion feels like a tremendous mistake.)

Anyway, again, you could probably get away with turning the whole thing into a labored Trump metaphor if Mickey 17 worked as an absurdist comedy or as a sort of existential horror film lingering on the trauma of Mickey’s deaths or as a forbidden romance between Mickey and Nasha (Naomi Ackie) as humanity attempts to settled this new, strange world. But the story is soggy, just a sequence of scenes stitched together via voiceover; the action almost nonexistent; the humor equally sparse and not nearly absurd enough to work; and, worst of all, the entire enterprise is just kind of dull. As one national figure we all know and hate might put it: sad!