Just like me
Clones, and the dual nature of Mickey 17
First, forgive the extended hiatus on missives fired from Orion’s Shoulder. The year started with a ferocious bout of covid, dramatically reducing the time I had to file a flummox of stuff before departing on a month-long trip in February, taking in the 75th Berlinale.
But we’re back, and I use the plural mischievously to signal this newsletter’s theme, examining the nature of clones in cinema, hung as it is on Parasite director Bong Bong-ho’s latest English-language feature, Mickey 17.
Rutger Hauer’s replicant Roy Batty isn’t quite a clone in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, but the synths are close cousins. Forged by Joe Turkel’s Tyrell, a cruel god who denies them both freedom and knowledge, he has enslaved his children. Damned to toil on far-off worlds in subhuman conditions because he does not deign to recognise their soul, they rebel as Lucifer once did.
“Fiery the angels fell,” Batty rumbles, paraphrasing brimstone-spewing poet William Blake’s epic, America a Prophecy. “Deep thunder rolled around their shores, burning with the fires of Orc.”
Two much of a good thing?
The idea of clones as two sides of Janus’ coin, both angel and devil with a defining choice stretched out before them, plays out in Bong’s considerably more mirthful but equally dystopian parable, Mickey 17, which I caught in Berlin.
Much as in Scott’s seminal spin on Philip K Dick, Earth has all but fallen in Bong’s spiky adaption of the Edward Ashton novel Mickey 7. A choking mess ravaged by apocalyptic winds, everyone who’s anyone wants off-world. Only Robert Pattinson’s hapless loser, Mickey Barnes, doesn’t really have a clue. Alongside fair weather mate Timo (ace South Korean actor Steven Yeun, who memorably popped up in Bong’s Okja), he’s just hooning around looking for a reason to ditch his gambling debts before he’s relieved of a limb.
The last time Pattison had a real bad time in outer space was Claire Denis’ bleak but in a different vibe High Life. Shit doubles down here, literally, as Mickey blindly signs himself up for the least fun of interplanetary pioneering gigs: as an expendable. Hurled into the worst-case scenarios off-world adventuring presents only to be cloned back to life when each body is dashed in the daily grind, a Groundhog Day’s worth of dastardly deaths awaits Mickey.
The grimmest detail of all is a running gag that sees him increasingly awkwardly re-cloned – memories, zits and all – by whizz bang-out-of-order technology that may look like an MRI scanner but is closer in landfill-destined DNA to an inscrutable office printer. Slouching towards the floor ungracefully as attendants fail to look on, these Temu Jesus resurrections are so very far from godly. So much so, that one doesn’t stick to the plan.
Left to die on Niflheim, a Hoth-like icy wasteland planet that’s apparently been plucked randomly as Earth 2.0 by Mark Ruffalo’s Trumpian cult leader Kenneth Marshall – all varnished tan and nasal stupidity – Mickey is unexpectedly saved by an avalanche of oversized snow maggots. Trudging his way back to the industrial tin can of a spaceship on which they’ve laboured for lord knows how long, an unhappy reunion only reveals he’s been cuckolded by his any-Mickey-will-do girlfriend Nasha (a magnificently charismatic Naomi Ackie), who’s already shacked up with his supposed replacement.
While Nasha immediately spies the horny potential in this 3D-printed mess of a ménage à trois, there’s the small detail to deal with that this scenario is, in fact, outlawed on an ethical basis (humanity has always been alarmingly hit and miss as to when such standards apply). Cue mayhem as the Mickeys – one much more menacing than the other – battle for pole position.
Australian actor Toni Collette is also in the mix as Marshall’s new sauce discovery-obsessed wife, Ylfa. She’s not quite as successful as Ruffalo in lampooning the increasingly unhinged depths of American politics as played to the social media baying crowd, and that’s partly a symptom of Bong’s shaggy dog misadventure. More than a bit scrappy, on-the-nose and as bloated as a corpse crystalising in deep space, it lacks Parasite’s precision or the grit of Snowpiercer’s class crash through.
But for all its pace-sagging heavy-handedness, it’s as wildly off-kilter as any of his proudly atonal horror stories, gloriously so. That this is a topsy-turvy world gone awfully wrong is built into the bit. Pattinson squared is having twice as much fun with it, bringing us along for the ride and its slide into genocidal politics all too recognisable in our own dystopian failure. One of the most gifted of younger actors, his ease in slipping between one skin job and the next makes Mickey 17 worth the intergalactic ticket.
Playing with Promethean fire
Before we wrap, I wanted to share a few of my favourite films that wrestle with the ethical conundrum of clones. As much as I love Sigourney Weaver – catching her in The Tempest on the West End last month – Alien: Resurrection does not feature, despite Ripley torching a room full of her failed simulacrums being one of the only moments of pathos in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s otherwise truly pathetic crash and burn of the xenomorph-driven franchise.
But two years before that mangled misfire, Jeunet, alongside his Delicatessen co-director Marc Caro, did deliver a much more accomplished nightmare in 1995’s haunting fable, La Cité des Enfants Perdus (The City of Lost Children). Daniel Emilfork’s disturbing rat catcher Krank, a misfired experiment himself, attempts, much like Batty, to stave off the eternal darkness of death. Stealing children and, in turn, their dreams to do so, he is enabled in this awful endeavour by a coterie of creeps, including six cloned henchmen. As twisted a tale as you’ll encounter, right down to Ron Perlman performing in French phonetically, it’s a cornerstone of my youthful cinematic awakening.
Mark Romanek’s bittersweet 2010 take on the Kazuo Ishiguro novel Never Let Me Go, adapted by Alex Garland, who later dabbled in a distinctly alien variation on clone warfare in 2018’s chimerical Annihilation, tackles the twin dilemma more directly. Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield play boarding school trio Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, caught up in a longing love triangle, much like Mickey 17, only less icky. Physically, that is, as the psychological damage the reality of cloning unleashes in this acting tour de force of inexorable fate is as yuck-making as it’s possible to be.
I’m also reminded of the profound effect Andrew Niccol’s aching directorial debut, Gattaca (1997), had on me. While the eugenic tinkering in this Frank Lloyd Wright-mainlining, retro-futuristic vision isn’t quite cloning per se, the idea of ‘perfecting’ humanity, then consigning the real deal to menial gigs grounded far from the stars matches with Mickey 17’s themes. Hawke is as gifted as ever as the ‘inferior’ brother Vincent to Loren Dean’s Anton, who signs a Faustian pact with Jude Law’s wheelchair-using former athlete Jerome to fool the world and take to the skies via romance with Uma Thurman’s co-worker Irene. It’s a cool-heeled but gripping musing on whether we should, just because we could, that also finds room for freaking Gore Vidal.
I could go on and on, and there’s always room for Bowie in Christopher Nolan’s intricately messy alternate history in The Prestige, but let’s wrap up with a more recent fave. I enjoyed the callously macabre fall-out from Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth as White Lotus-like toffs unbound from consequence via dubious duplicates in horror scion Brandon Cronenberg’s erotic nightmare, Infinity Pool.
The one through line from all of this is that the emotional violence of cloning for so-called human benefit wreaks untold damage. As such, if Batty can save Deckard against his own best interests because it’s the right thing to do, maybe our poor, abused copies are more than us monstrous humans will ever be.
Elsewhere
You can read all about the movies I loved most at Berlinale over at Flicks.
For Time Out, I reviewed the riot that is Rose Byrne-led If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
I interviewed Inside director Charles Williams for The Saturday Paper.
For ScreenHub, I reviewed Berlinale Teddy Award-winner Lesbian Space Princess, as well as the third season of Mike White’s floundering-without-Tanya The White Lotus, plus Australian hero Invisible Boys.
And you can read my interview with Spit star David Wenham and his director Jonathan Teplitzky at the ABC here.