After a long absence from ranting, I find myself needing to vent. I just watched Mickey 17. I had to force myself to finish after the first 20 minutes. It was that bad.
This isn't a review. This is a critique. Enough people have reviewed this film, but I felt I needed to express my opinions as a means of expiating this garbage from my mind. This pile of dreck, disguising itself as scientific and social commentary, is why the vast majority of what is called entertainment these days is worthless garbage not fit for celluloid. I know I'm expressing an anachronism in referring to film, since most movies are shot digitally, but it is a fair analogy.
Movies used to be shot on celluloid film. For those who have never used the medium I will explain. In earlier days movies used a film that was covered with a gelatin film with silver halide crystals. This means that the substance that held the picture on the transparent film was silver. It made film very expensive to produce and develop. A lot of care was taken to compose a sequence. A lot of time went in to making sure that as little of the precious film stock found its way to the cutting room floor. Today, it's only memory. An hour of 8k video takes up about 22.5 gigabytes of memory. With petabytes available for most productions its no wonder that most action films have no script when filming. They just shoot a bunch of action scenes and then put it together later. You just need a general outline. You create the film in the editing room, and CGI in anything you don't have. That's how you get the garbage that vomits out of the major movie houses. You can watch entire documentaries about how The Hobbit Trilogy was drastically different than The Lord of The Rings Trilogy. Even though they were produced, directed, and written by Peter Jackson and crew. There wasn't the careful planning, and meticulous attention to detail. They didn't need to because they switched from film to digital cinema. What came out was garbage.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not harping on digital video. Remember I come from a production background. I have shot on film, tape, and digital. I know what it's like to waste lots of film stock on garbage. I know what it's like to economize on video tape when you have a limited stock and lots to shoot. I know what it's like to take a dozen pictures and delete 90% because I found fault with them. I've been in both worlds. I know the mentality. If you have an almost unlimited resource you get lazy and sloppy. That is how you wind up with garbage. That is how you end up with Mickey 17.
Imagine the Critical Drinker narrating this: So let's begin, shall we:
Where do I begin with this lazy, preachy, ham-fisted, illogical, dumpster fire of a film? Let's start with it's strongest selling point - the premise.
It starts with our protagonist Mickey. He's a loser. A dumb, brainless, pathetic, waste of a human who finds himself in dire need of escaping a sadistic, ugly, ruthless loan shark. So he decides he really needs to leave Earth. It's the future and space travel is available. Everyone wants to escape Earth because of...reasons that are never explained. He finds himself with a bunch of people desperate to escape, and they all want to leave the planet with a failed politician.
This is when we get our first clue about the political bent of the movie, filmmakers, actors, and characters as a reporter begins interviewing them and they all wear red shirts and have red hats. UGH! They are all a bunch of desperate sheep who have the collective brain power of a 10 watt light bulb. And for some reason a church is brought into the mix as a backer of this initiative. Why is religion involved and which one is being lampooned? Don't know. But who cares, it's religion after all and religion is bad because of...reasons.
But then pan to our protagonist who signs up to become an 'expendable' because he did what most people do when confronted with terms of service contracts and says "yeah I read it". Now I understand this logic, but it still doesn't explain why everyone is so eager to accept it as an answer. These days if you do anything controversial there would be a myriad of people trying to talk you out of it, because lawyers are a thing. But were are the lawyers in this? Don't know. But like the fine print in Mikey's contract the filmmakers are hoping you don't care enough to ask.
"Expendables" are people who volunteer to be cloned every time they die. Somehow retaining all the knowledge and experiences of the previous version without having the key "brain scan" happening. How do they do this? Don't know. Who cares really? The writers of the script sure don't. Mickey just gets printed out of a machine. All of the material used for this cloning process coming from an unfathomably hot mess of goo that is made from all the biological waste the ship's crew creates on a daily basis. How does this happen? Don't know. The writers just hope that's a question you never ask.
So our intrepid protagonist is forced to endure all manner of death from radiation, disease, and the repeated medical experiments of the ship's doctor. The doctor obviously got his degree from Mengele University as he sadistically creates a new clone of Mickey only to kill him in the most torturous fashion while he begs him to tell him all about how he feels while dying. In one scene he sends him out in a space suit to be irradiated and then tells him to take off his glove to see what the effects will be, only to have the hand severed by a rotating antenna. It's played for laughs, but I wasn't laughing. There is a montage of Mickey being printed and repeatedly ignored by the medical staff. At one point he's printed out and flops helpless on the floor. In many instances his care, treatment, and general attitudes surrounding him are flippant, uncaring, unfeeling, emotionless, and devoid of all humanity. Everyone treats him like garbage, except "diverse female character". Even his "friend" who made him take money from a loan shark treats him like a disposable item. Early on in the movie his "friend" finds him badly injured at the bottom of a crevasse and leaves him for dead, despite knowing he's alive.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear. Medical professionals DO NOT BEHAVE THIS WAY! By the end of the first act I was disgusted by the entire crew. Every one of them was narcissistic, unfeeling, neurotic, and generally a bad person.
Every.
Last.
ONE.
That includes the "diverse female character" that quickly becomes his love interest at the beginning of the film. All she's interested in is sex. That's it. By the end of the movie the script says she cares about him, but at no point during the film do I get any substantive reinforcement of that. All she and Mickey do is copulate. There isn't any romance. There isn't any bonding. And despite the fact that sex and childbearing is dangerous, not to mention impossible, in space, they still do it. Thank goodness I have fast forward. It's just filler to pad out the runtime and provide a plot device at the climax of the film. It's just a garbage trope. The writer and director Bong Joon Ho substitutes it for character development. IT ISN'T. It's bad writing from a bad writer who doesn't understand his genre or material.
The entire premise could have been great. The characters could have explored the meaning and frailties of life. It could have explored the ethical and moral dilemmas involved. It didn't. It just plays Mickey's deaths and callousness by his fellow crew for laughs. It wasn't funny. It wasn't witty. It wasn't introspective. It was just garbage that made me wish they all died along with him.
Next let's examine the other scientific issues with the movie. They eventually find a world where they land. It's entirely ice. That isn't a place you explore for colonization. It's a meat locker where everyone would die. If the writer had done his homework he would have probably looked up Jamestown or any of the early settlements of the Americas'. If it hadn't been for the Native Americans who took pity on them, most of them would have died in the first year, and many of them did. You would never colonize a planet that had zero chance of supporting human life without a massive amount of terraforming.
Next is the pathogen in the air when they first land. Something that killed of generations of Mickey's before a vaccine was discovered. Who's to say that that was the ONLY pathogen that would kill the population? Are we supposed to believe that there is only one hemorrhagic virus on the planet that doesn't mutate? Don't know.
Next there is the only indigenous life forms. A shaggy beast that looks like a cross between a wood lice and a woolly mammoth. They're also telepathic and know all kinds of things without being told. Also they communicate with clicks that a scientist discovers and makes a translator for Mickey to use in the final act of the film during a blizzard. These life forms are nice and want to be friends, but only with Mickey because everyone else is bad. They communicate this to Mickey through the magical translator that has never been used. Never had any time with the subjects being communicated to. Developed by a scientist who might not know linguistics. How would we know? Don't know. We're just supposed to believe that she has this magical device that she just made and totally understands why Mickey would need it. Why do we care about these life forms? Because the mean wife of the mean "Not Donald Trump" politician can make a "sauce" out of it. By "sauce" I think she means food, but it's hard to tell because it makes no sense in the culinary context. After all, the only food we have seen being served is either a wafer of some sort and a paste like substance that looks more like excrement that food. Kind of like this film. It's just the sort of excrement that Hollywood thinks you'll eat if you don't have a brain.
Last let's address the elephant in the room. The overt over-the-top political messaging of the film. We get that Mark Ruffalo, and the bulk of Hollywood doesn't like the bad Orange Man. About a third of the country agrees with you. Guess what. A third of the country disagrees with you. And the rest of the country, like myself, may have voted for the guy (not because we like him, but because your candidate sucked). Those of us who want to leave politics to the month before the election and the rest of life centered on our own lives, just want those who are married to politics to shut up about it.
We're tired of seeing people be demonized for thinking differently than you. We go to the movies to get away from partisan garbage, not to be lectured at. If you want to make something to entertain yourself, make a presentation for the Democratic Party Convention. Otherwise leave it out of the cinema. We're sick of it. In short.
There's a reason why no one, including me, sees your movies in the theater anymore. The movies are garbage.
There's a reason why most people stream movies, and may not finish watching them. The movies are garbage.
There's a reason why Hollywood is hemorrhaging money and only one or two movies are profitable nowadays. The movies are garbage.
There's a reason why all you see coming to theaters are sequels, prequels, reboots, and rehashes of stories told better my more talented people. Your writers are garbage.
There's a reason why movies looked better 20 years ago even though the computing power has advanced significantly in the time since. Your directors are garbage.
There's a reason why a recent poll found that celebrity endorsements don't sway elections. Your opinions are garbage. No body cares about your garbage politics. That's not why they see movies and you alienate half your audience with your garbage political jabs.
The only thing I can say is that movies have a hard time getting the science right. When they do, the work is a cinematic masterpiece. When they don't? Well, lets just say that Mickey 17 has as much in common with science as Lord of the Rings does. It's all fantasy.
But let's sum this up in a conclusion.
Mickey 17 suffered from bad story, bad writing, bad directing, bad acting, bad scripting, bad effects, and generally vomit inducing bad everything. The only thing good about the movie is the copyright title card at the end. It signified the end of my suffering. Warner Brothers should do the world a favor and copy Disney's Willow. Send this digital file to the Delete Bin.
