When you look at “Mickey 17,“It is impossible not to connect to current events. Mark Ruffalos Kenneth Marshall -charactera flamboyant and flaming politicians leading sci-fi filmThe space cessation of colonizing an ice plane clearly has trumpic properties in the way his thin skin manifests itself.
The audience will, of course, also draw a direct connection to the billionaire’s space exploration of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, with the film’s central notion that companies are prepared to look after life beyond the earth when its environment deteriorates. While a guest on an upcoming episode of IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast, author/director Bong Joon Ho Permitted through translators that current events sipped into ”Mickey 17“Just not in the way some people think.
“I probably think Pandemin flowed into this adjustment process,” said Bong, who adapted the script from Edward Ashon’s sci-fi novel “Mickey7.” “I wrote the script in 2021. We were still in the middle of the pandemic, so in the movie we also see Mickey become the lab with all vaccine tests.”
In the movie Mickey (Robert Pattinson) register to be “an consumable”, willing to die and be printed (his memories stored on a huge hard drive) and become a researcher’s ship to study how to survive their new planet, NiFlheim. Mickey’s repeated bicycle of laboratory testing, then painful death, since human repression, becomes the film’s central visual metaphor for dehumanization in this exploration world run by the unhealthy alliance of religion, business and yes, politics.
Bong said: “I would lie if I say we didn’t think about the political context and the political atmosphere when I created this.” The director told Indiewire that when he developed the character, he showed Ruffalo videos and photos of a “special Korean politician”, while the actor showed him photos of an “American governor from back on the day … We did not really focus on serious, heavy dictators.
Marshall’s deeply sitting uncertainty drives childish behavior and the need for approval in the form of subordinate bootlicking, as in Bong’s film, over-the-top satire. But through the lens from director Bong’s twisted humor, it comes from somewhere dark.
“We have heard of stories about Hitler when he was in Vienna, was offended by certain things, and who culminated for other things – not to motivate the horrible things that politicians do, but when you go through a lot of trauma, or you feel this inferiority complex against something, and you can make it the wrongdo “And if you think of Marshall, we don’t really know his story, but we can say that he has a very low sense of self -value.”
Although these characteristics are common among many of our most ridiculous and dangerous politicians – and therefore recognizable – Bong Marshall sees as unique. What appealed to his humor was how they manifested themselves in his dynamics with his wife, Gwen (Toni Collette). The duo acts as both the film’s villains and comic foils.
“He always relies on his wife, and it feels like Toni Collette’s character almost manipulates Marshall, and she is the one who has control over him,” Bong said. “So this is a unique dictator character that we see.”
On the surface, Ruffalo seems to be an unusual choice for the character, something that the actor himself confessed to the director after reading the script. The Oscar-nominated actor is not known for comedy or plays a villain, and yet director Bong, a fan of “Zodiac” and “Foxcatcher”, wrote the role with him in mind.
“For me it was not important if Mark had done a villain before he was actually the perfect actor to make Marshall,” Bong said. “I always thought he was such a big nuanced actor. But there is this very vulnerable and weak side of him. You can say that this guy is probably easily damaged. “
To listen to Bong Joon Ho’s March 7 -interview about “Mickey 17”, subscribe to Toolkit podcast on AppleThe SpotifyThe Or your favorite podcast platform.
