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.

TENET (3/5 Stars)

 

Boy, do I miss movie theaters. If there ever was a type of movie that necessitated big screen viewing, it would be a Christopher Nolan movie (The Dark Knight, Inception, Dunkirk). He specializes in IMAX photography and elaborate action sequences. He has not made a small movie for over a decade, the last being The Prestige in 2006. When I set out to watch Tenet, an original spy thriller (as opposed to the 26^th installment of James Bond or the 8^th Mission Impossible which was itself a remake of a TV series), I tried to see it on the largest screen possible, a big TV at a friend’s house. Terrible choice. Phones rang, people talked throughout, a young child spent half the time screaming and running around. It was hard to concentrate. By the second half of the movie, I had no idea what was going on.

 

Recently, I tried to see it again, late at night and very few other people around. Unfortunately, I still cannot say I completely understand the movie. I guestimate I am about 2/3rds into understanding. It is complicated. The downside of originality of course is that you are showing something new.

 

Tenet involves objects with reversed entropy. They are inverted in time. Now, the way human’s experience entropy is the progression of time in the presence and always going forward. When an object is inverted, it appears to the human to be going backwards in time. A sort of helpful example is an inverted wall that holds many inverted bullets. A character known only as the Protagonist (“John David Washington”) aims a gun at the inverted wall and the inverted bullet is shot out of the walled and is caught by the gun in the Protagonist’s hand. That is as simple as the temporal acrobatics get. Other temporal acrobatics include: fistfights, car chases, a heist, a military operation known as a temporal pincer move. These are incredible sight, but underneath the surface there remains a nagging question: What on earth am I watching?

 

I think a large problem this movie has is not that it introduces this wacky idea about inverted entropy, it is that the rest of the story is highly obscure. For instance, we do not know the main character’s name or anything about him. We do no know who is sending these inverted objects back through time or why they are doing so. The movie globetrots around the planet from London, to India, to Monaco, to Russia. It is hard to get a solid footing at any one place. All the characters are new and they speak like spies, that is, in vaguely threatening tones. I like to think I am a perceptive viewer, and I take as evidence that my understanding of previous Christopher Nolan films with their myriad temporal and structural complexities. Figuring out the puzzle is something I usually enjoy. Tenet is just one level too much. There are times when I think about this movie, and I remember a scene that doesn’t quite make sense and I’m not sure if there is an explanation somewhere or is it just sloppy storytelling and there actually is no explanation, perhaps the opening scene which involved an inverted bullet. Am I too know where that inverted bullet comes from? How did it get there? Now, I have seen the movie twice, and I still am not certain of it. I think two viewings are enough to conclude a movie is indeed confusing and not merely complex.

 

A fun thing about Christopher Nolan movies is that they sometimes are windows into the toys of the very very rich. I recall seeing Inception and being impressed very expensive suits of everyone in the first class section of the international flight. Here, we are introduced to a “Freeport”, which is where rich people store paintings to avoid taxes. Robert Pattinson walks around it in a very expensive suit and looks more adult than I have ever seen him.

 

The bad guy leaves something to be desired. He is supposed to be a nefarious Russian oligarch but is played by Kenneth Branagh. Now, I know I’m supposed to be impressed by the reputation of Branagh, but I confess to not really liking him too much in anything besides Henry V, which was in the 1980s. His Shakespeare adaptations are poor and I refuse to see him embody Hercule Poirot. Here, he is kind just too soft and flabby to really have much of a nefarious screen presence. Of course, he is not helped by the confusing narrative. The Russian oligarch has a supermodel wife played by Elizabeth Dibecki. This woman is too tall. I’m not sure she is actually that tal. I think the movie may have added some inches. Either way, not my thing. As stated before, Robert Pattinson looks the part in this movie. John David Washington, as the protagonist, does a decent job. His character is a bit of a blank slate, so not much acting is required, but he does what is required in the action sequences, particularly the bit where he has a fist-fight with an inverted antagonist.

 

I can’t really recommend TENET other than to say, if you do see, try to see it in a theater. This is a movie that will be definitely worse seen at home.

 

The Lighthouse (4/5 Stars)

“The Lighthouse” is firmly rooted in that David Lynch territory where realism and continuity are sacrificed to effect and mood. What we are seeing on the screen is not so much what the characters are experiencing but what they feel they are experiencing. And what they are feeling looks to be the sailor’s version of cabin fever. There are two men, an experienced lighthouse operator played by Willem Dafoe and his new apprentice played by Robert Pattinson. What happened to the last apprentice that worked here asks Pattinson. He ended his own life, explains Dafoe, after going mad.

“The Lighthouse” was directed by Robert Eggers, written in cooperation with his brother Max Eggers. Writer/Director teams of brothers (Coens, Wachowskis, Nolans) have led to some of the more confidently weird movies in existence. This team of brothers can be added to that shortlist. The Eggers are relatively new. They have only one other mainstream movie (The Witch) which I have just added to my Netflix queue.

There is much to the “The Lighthouse” that makes it a unique experience. To start, the movie is shot in black and white and has a narrow aspect ratio. The time of the story looks like the late 1800s or early 1900s. There is only one location, a lighthouse on a deserted rock. The original score blares ominously, and much delusions of mermaids and pigeons. Then there is the ACTING, which involves much yelling in Irish/Scottish/pirate brogue. The dialect is given special mention in the credits because it is not of this time and seemingly not of this world. Willem Dafoe, not a particularly handsome man, and Robert Pattinson, who I insist does not look normal, successfully inhabit this alien land. They spend much of the time drinking moonshine and colorfully cursing each other.

There is some character background and plot but it doesn’t much get in the way of the weirdness. To summarize, Robert Pattinson is new to the lighthouse, drawn to the job because the wages are higher for work on desolate rocks in the middle of nowhere. Willem Dafoe appears to have been there forever. He is a hard taskmaster, but when a storm grounds all work (preventing the new man from leaving at the end of his tour), and there is nothing to do all day but get piss drunk and dance, the professionalism of the lighthouse suffers quite a bit.

This is one of the those movies I would love to hear a director’s commentary for (not that these things are done much these days) because I can only imagine how crazy it was to be on the set with Willem Dafoe cursing up a piratical storm. I bet there are a lot more good stories there.