Mickey17 (3/5 Stars)

A “Straw Man Argument” is a logical fallacy where an opposite position is distorted into an extreme version and then argued against. Instead of addressing the actual argument, a straw man argument presents a simplified or false version of the opponent’s stance.

Science fiction polemics, by their very nature, are straw man arguments. Because they take place in the future, the proponent gets to lay the groundwork for several hundred (maybe thousands) of years of distortion by making the audience assume that across the vastness of time and space the opposite argument when enacted into policy will naturally result in an inevitable and disastrous slope towards dystopia.

Here, in writer/director Bong Joon-Ho’s newest movie, Mickey 17, we are introduced to a world where the world is beset by environmental destruction and rampant organized crime. The remainder of the human race desperately seeks to leave a doomed Earth for a distant planet. A buffoonish politician (Mark Ruffalo) and his Machiavellian wife (Toni Collette) lay on thick plans of cultish demagoguery for the new settlement, which an utterly naive populace consumes without a hint of critical thought. One especially pitiful creature, Mickey Barnes (played by Robert Pattison) signs up to be an expendable, which apparently is a category of human being that agrees to be cloned for the purpose of suicidal tasks that range from being exposed to radiation, to being a test subject for biological weapons, to being a guinea pig for the development of vaccines. We are introduced to Mickey 17, who provides an elongated voiceover explanation as to the gruesome fate of versions 1-16.

For various reasons that need even more elongated voiceover explanation, this particular spaceship can only have one expendable on it, so Mickey is tasked with every single suicidal task the mission requires. He’s a great help. Indeed by his multiple sacrifices he saves many lives and is hard to imagine the mission succeeding at all without him. You would think these people would be grateful. But they aren’t, because apparently the future is full of shitheads. (Except for the one black woman. Black women, as we all ought to know, are magic negroes imbued with a sense of heightened morality brought upon by the extreme intersectionality of their historic victimhood).  They treat him as if everyone was still in grade school and he came to class with the wrong kind of shoes. I don’t think Mickey Barnes is even being paid.

Would society in the future actually not care about the experience of cloned people? Would we treat them as second class citizens? I ask you, given the world as it is today, why that would be a probable outcome? There have been many science fiction books and movies about cloned people. Can you think of one example where the author isn’t sympathetic to their plight? Do you hear anyone today arguing that clones might be a decent source of cheap slave labor? Wouldn't it be odd if our culture in the 20th-21st Century started out uniformly sympathetic towards clones and then turned with uniformed antipathy against them sometime in the future? And yet, in every single one of these science fiction books and movies, the creator assumes that this will be the case. If there is basically no one with antipathy against clones today, who exactly is Bong Joon-Ho arguing with here?

The answer I don’t think is any one segment of society that actually has antipathy towards clones. I believe Bong Joon-Ho’s argument is against capitalism and he is setting his scene way far into the future to suggest an inevitable outcome of the march of capitalism towards some dystopia where the lives of human beings become valueless in the face of corporations or contracts. It is telling that he wouldn’t be able to make that argument today, since all that has occurred since the introduction of capitalism as a ruling orthodoxy in society (starting say in England circa the Industrial Revolution) is the steady democratization of political power, an exponential rise in the standard of living, and the universal acceptance of human rights, at least in societies that use capitalism. There are still plenty of places that do not have capitalism, and the people there remain slaves to power monopolies. I’m not sure why Bong Joon-Ho, if he is so concerned about the plight of humans, can’t direct a satiric gaze at North Korea, the totalitarian state across the border, where people are treated like animals as we speak, not far off in the distant future.

One of the more influential pieces of culture in the past few years to originate from South Korea was Squid Game, a contemporary story about a group of capitalistic elites (mainly composed of gay texans and at least one Chinese man) pit debt-laden and put-upon South Koreans against each other in fights-to-the-death. Have any of these people ever heard of North Korea? Squid Game could take place there, except of course, for the prize money element.

Mickey 17 draws parallels (and maybe inspiration) from a better movie about science fiction clones. That would be 2009's Moon by Duncan Jones starring Sam Rockwell. That is a much better critique of capitalism. The main difference is that the original Sam Rockwell astronaut sold his genetic material to a corporation and gave them the permission to use and dispose of his clones on a remote lunar base. In that movie, the original guy is sitting at home getting paid for the work his clones are performing. His clones, although expendable and not privy to the truth, are treated with a nominal amount of respect. No one goes out of their way to insult them and the robot on the base is programmed to be helpful. It is a much more interesting take on the subject since it is much closer to an actual moral quandary that someday could occur.

Moon came out in 2009. At the time, it was impressive to see Sam Rockwell interact with himself on screen. In 2025, although I enjoyed the performance of Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17, I am no longer impressed all that much by seeing two of the same actor interact with himself. It’s not all that much of a novelty any longer. It is always nice to see Steven Yeun show up in a movie. It would have been better if he was around longer and was more important to the plot. Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette ham it up as real idiots and that go about doing real stupid things. One wonders how they could ever be put in charge of anything, and then one remembers that this takes place in the dystopic future where everything is possible.

Has it really been six years since Bong Joon-Ho made his previous film, the great Parasite. Do you notice the integral difference between that movie and this one? Parasite takes place in the present day. So, to make it believable, there couldn't be the underhanded straw man cheating that is possible in science fiction movies. Joon-Ho was forced to present characters that would be believable in our time. That constraint made for a much better movie. He should do more of that and, please, more often.

Parasite (5/5 Stars)

Once upon a time there were two families, one rich and one poor. The rich lived at the top of the hill. At the bottom lived the poor. “Parasite” is the latest effort from writer/director Bong Joon Ho (“The Host”, “Okja”). Its scope is specific, it concerns itself with two families in Seoul, South Korea, one rich and one poor and takes place almost entirely within two homes. Its effect is broad. I expect families all over the world regardless of location or language would immediately understand the themes. Like most great cinema, “Parasite” finds in the details a larger universal truth. No wonder this Korean film won the Palme D’or a Cannes and has grossed over $100 million outside South Korea. I think this movie has the better chance at a Best Picture Oscar than any other foreign language film I have ever seen.

The poor family’s name is Kim. The patriarch is played by Kang-ho Song, the only actor I recognized. The parents are unemployed and the family earns the rent for his basement apartment by taking on gig jobs like folding pizza boxes. One day, the son is presented with an opportunity to be recommended as a English language tutor for daughter of the Park family, the rich family at the top of the hill. The son asks the school friend that wants to recommend him for the job: “Why pick a loser like me?” The school friend explains that he has a crush on the rich daughter and does not want to recommend a tutor that the daughter would ever consider. The poor son takes no offense. He know he is poor.

Deceit is required to be hired. Educational degrees are forged. The rich mother (played here by Yea-Jeong Jo) is particularly gullible and says things that make the poor son believe she could be further deceived. Step by step the Kims insert themselves into employment in the Park household. The poor daughter becomes the art therapist for the rich son. The poor father becomes the chauffeur of the rich father. The poor mother becomes the full-time maid. The Parks are not exactly being taken advantage. The Kims are totally competent and do their jobs well. The people that suffer are the other employees the Kims succeed in defaming and having terminated. The Parks are more unaware than anything. The Kims are

Now we are at the midpoint of the movie. The Parks leave town for a camping trip. In the night, the old housekeeper comes back claiming she has forgotten something in the basement. At this point, the movie twists in a weird, suspenseful, and supremely satisfying way that all marketing have deftly avoided spoiling. I too would not dream of saying anymore about the plot and from here on out will only wax philosophical.

In one scene, the Kims are discussing the Parks. The poor son says, “They are rich, but nice.” The mother disagrees: “The are nice because they are rich. If I were rich, I would be soooo nice.”

And why wouldn’t the Parks be nice people? They are secure and comfortable and are treated nicely by everyone they meet. One would be tempted to conclude that it is the poor Kims that are treating the rich Parks poorly. But then an unexpected tragedy occurs, and the rich Parks, in particular the naïve rich mother, perform an act so extraordinarily insensitive that it approaches cruelty, except of course, that the Parks have no idea that they are acting cruelly because the Kims have been so thoroughly dishonest. Mayhem follows and the movie resolves itself in such an unexpected symmetry that the story elevates itself into the realm of timeless parable.

What is the responsibility of the Parks to know what is going on around them? How much fault do the Kims have for their part in sheltering the Parks. I was reminded by the chapter in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” where the protagonist, a black student at a black college in the south, accidentally chauffeurs a white trustee of the college to the wrong side of town. The white trustee is appalled by the poverty, seemingly seeing it for the first time. Back at the college, the black college president expels the student for showing the white trustee the poor conditions of the community. As the black college president explains, his power over the protagonist comes from his efforts to make the whites feel good about themselves and he does this by keeping from them societal truths. That is not so different from the story of the Kims and Parks. The rich live in bliss on the clouds. Down below the starving poor eat each other.