Letterboxd: Mickey 17, 2025 - ★★½

Bong Joon Ho makes stylish movies that acknowledge class, which is something. But there’s always a point when you’re along for the ride, but the movie switches tracks and goes somewhere less interesting. There's some entertaining spectacle of the strangeness of the upperclass, a bit of hypernormalization, and some small, unexpected twists. Was there more in the book about sex, relationships, recreational drug use, and the general social dynamics between and among those filling the different roles in this ship? And in a film so heavy on exposition, it's hard to believe that all those threads were left dangling. A tedious dénouement ignored them all to have Mickey narrate a montage showing how we got from the final climax to the sort of "six months later" scene that's so commonplace it never needs a setup. It also resolved one important subplot by briefly introducing a character we've never seen through a hastily recapped and entirely improbable action sequence. I couldn't help but wonder if there was studio interference and how different the film might be with better editing.