I‘ve been saying this for a long time and feel no need to refute myself now or at any time in the near future: South Koreans make the best movies in the world. Bear with me while I show my work. In the 1950s and ’60s, we had filmmaking innovators like Han Hyung-mo and his melodramatic throwback “Madame Freedom,” followed by Yu Hyun-mok’s post-war neorealist downer “Aimless Bullet” and Kim Ki-young’s masterpiece “The Housemaid,” which brought South Korean cinema to the eyes of the world.
But it was in the early 2000s when American audiences (myself included) began to take notice of the truly remarkable filmmaking that was coming out of South Korea. Three absolute masters led the pack of those recent South Korean auteurs: Park Chan-wook took a hammer to genre cinema with 2003’s “Oldboy,” Kim Jee-woon perfected the ghost story with 2003’s “A Tale of Two Sisters,” and Bong Joon Ho crafted one of the finest serial killer films of all time with 2003’s “Memories of Murder.”
While all three have had varying levels of success in the States (Park’s 2016 flawless “The Handmaiden” and Kim’s 2010 neo-noir classic “I Saw the Devil,” just to name a couple), it’s Bong Joon Ho who seems to have really broken away from the pack with his pitch-black, modern classic “Parasite.”
Most of Bong’s films are madcap and scathing indictments of classicism, capitalism and human stupidity, but told through differing genres and wildly inventive technical approaches to storytelling. While “The Host” looks at a financially struggling but loving family as they must survive the attack of a giant monster, “Snowpiercer” divides the haves from the have-nots aboard a speeding train barreling through the remnants of a destroyed world. His newest English-language film, “Mickey 17,” takes his disgust of late-stage capitalism and combines it with a bone-weary look at how humanity treats itself, its planet and the animals that live on it, stirring it all together in a slapstick, sci-fi comedy that revels in its own ridiculousness.
“Mickey 17” tells the story of Mickey Barnes (played by the bottomlessly brilliant Robert Pattinson), a destitute young man drowning in debt and self-loathing on an Earth that is very quickly getting ready to give up the ghost. After getting in trouble with a cartoonishly dangerous loan shark, he applies to become an Expendable on a spaceship (led by a failed politician and his wife) headed four years out into the unknown to colonize a cold and remote planet known as Niflheim. As the only Expendable onboard, his job is simple: Do all the dangerous things that no one else can do because they equal certain death. He dies horribly, is cloned with all his memories intact, then does it all over again.
Just like Bong’s two other English-language features, “Okja” and “Snowpiercer,” there’s no room for subtlety in “Mickey 17.” Mark Ruffalo (as the politician leading the colonizers to Niflheim) is doing a fearlessly broad Trump impersonation, while Toni Collette (as Ruffalo’s casually cruel wife obsessed with sauces) channels the spirit of Marjorie Taylor Greene. All of the film’s big opinions on climate change, greed, class warfare and capitalism are lampshaded, underlined and as obvious as possible… and, at this stage in our social and political climate, that’s a feature and not a bug.
Don’t get me wrong, I love subtlety and subtext in movies, but there’s a reason why Bong’s English movies jettison any and all moments of understatement: He thinks a majority of Western audiences won’t get what he’s trying to say and I can’t really fault him for that. The time for subtlety in art is paused. These days, if you leave any room for interpretation in what you’re saying, someone else will tell you what you meant and sell it as fact. So, instead of letting us decide what he’s trying to say, Bong is instead grabbing his audience by their faces and screaming, “Late-stage capitalism and the loss of basic human empathy will lead you to this!!”
As a follow-up to a modern classic like “Parasite,” there’s no way something as goofy and overstuffed as “Mickey 17” could be anything other than disappointing. Still, the film so enjoyably conjures silly existentialist dread while moonlighting as a sci-fi comedy that, even when losing focus in its second half (focusing on a thinly sketched romance featuring the luminously badass Naomi Ackie and having a solid 15 minutes that could be excised without losing any of its power), it’s a subversively intelligent and absurdist work from one of South Korea’s finest. It’s imperfect, but it might be what we need at this exact moment in time.
BONUS SOUTH KOREAN PRIMER:
cinema of South Korea, here are five great places to start:
This article appears in The Source Weekly March 13, 2025.
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