Mickey 17: Bong Joon-ho's Promise of Difference

I remember an old interview with Bong Joon-ho.

When asked what kind of director he wanted to be remembered as, he said,

"I want to be remembered as someone who never did the same thing twice."

That single sentence stayed with me.

So watching Mickey 17 wasn't just an act of expectation - it was an act of verification.

Bong Joon-ho's science fiction? How could my heart not race?

Just knowing that such a director exists in this country fills me with pride.

Mickey 17 left a deep mark on me.

The original novel was Mickey 7, but in Bong's hands, it became 17.

Why seventeen?

I didn't realize it until the very end - and when I did, it sent chills down my spine.

Of course, this is only my interpretation. The director may have meant something else.

Forgive the length.

Conciseness isn't in my nature.

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I love Bong Joon-ho's peculiar architecture of contradiction.

A protagonist who tries not to die, only to end up in a place where he must die forever.

That setup alone carries Bong's DNA.

From Barking Dogs Never Bite to Mickey 17, he's been dissecting humanity through irony and dilemma.

It's an almost perverse precision - closer to reverence than admiration.

"Class is eternal." That's when the phrase applies.

Mickey starts a macaron business with borrowed money.

It ends disastrously.

And yet - it's hilarious.

Bong is a genius at this kind of tonal imbalance.

Macarons! That tiny, frivolous thing reveals the character perfectly.

And as always, a ruined man's escape leads farther and farther away - this time, beyond Earth itself.

He's fleeing loan sharks but ends up in a laboratory.

He becomes expendable, not human.

A living rat - or rather, a surviving one.

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Then comes Marshall, a washed-up politician trying to build a kingdom on an alien planet.

Incompetent, greedy, and absurdly self-important.

His followers are even worse.

The world that emerges when such men hold power is predictable,

yet Bong renders it with grotesque comedy.

His satire of class and authority remains razor-sharp.

The dinner scene is explosive.

Mickey sits at a table, listening to the smug hypocrisy of a married couple - until he throws up.

That's pure Bong Joon-ho catharsis: funny, awkward, and deeply satisfying.

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Mickey keeps dying and being cloned.

But he's never quite the same.

Each version is a little different - each one meets the others.

It feels like an allegory for self-understanding.

We all evolve that way: anger, cowardice, empathy, avoidance.

No single version defines us.

Eventually, Mickey meets his seventeenth and eighteenth selves.

They try to destroy each other - but end up cooperating.

That's where I saw the triumph over self-denial:

to confront, converse with, and accept oneself.

That is the essence of growth.

Beside him stands Nasha - righteous, awake, and the only one who treats him as human.

Through her, Mickey changes.

At the moment he moves from seventeen to eighteen, he becomes an adult.

The age of maturity overlaps with the number of awakening. That moment sent a shiver through me.

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To me, this is a coming-of-age story.

Even the officer who once mocked Mickey ends up helping him.

She, too, awakens.

It's a story about how the change in one person can ripple outward to the world.

Bong's sci-fi speaks of dystopia, yet contains hope.

He built a world in a genre he had never touched - 

and did it in a way no one else could.

And then there's the revenge:

mocking Hollywood with Hollywood's own money.

Only Bong Joon-ho could pull that off.

A director who twists the empire using its own capital - 

one wonders what Warner Bros. thought when they saw it.

I can no longer rank Bong Joon-ho's films.

That would be like asking, "Al Pacino or Robert De Niro?"

The answer is always - both.