Aaron's Thoughts
I think my favorite thing about Bong Joon-Ho as a filmmaker is how he excels at getting the audience invested in every character (big and small) on screen. Some of those character building moments are big & some of them are incredibly small, but they all make a massive impact over the course of a two hour film. Especially when most movies nowadays don’t have protagonists that feel as well rounded as even some of the supporting characters in his films.
We all know that Bong isn’t known for his subtlety & Mickey 17 is no different, but boy is it fun. Pattinson is excellent & Ruffalo is a riot.
There are no shortage of themes & ideas to take away from the film, even if he does once again opt for a sledgehammer to hit the nail. There is the angle of how corporations or governments don’t see those it oversees as actually humans (and quite literally expendable). There are angles environmentalism & colonialism. There is the angle of fascism. But one of my favorite (more subtle) angles is just how romantic of a film it is. The idea of having someone out there who loves every version of you, even the versions you wish you could strangle is really cool. Makes me think about how well this will play in a rewatch. There is so much baked in and happening that you probably can’t even appreciate it all on the first watch.
Go see this in theaters. It isn’t often that you walk into the cinema and sit down to see a new film from a legend. It also isn’t often that someone parlays the success of a best picture winner into something that the studio is so scared of that they are burying.
