Bong Joon Ho despatched a textual content message a bit previous midday, naming a subway station in Seoul and asking me to fulfill him there at 7 p.m. In his imperfect English, he signed off with a cryptic tease: “I’ll present you some odd however unusual space. See you in entrance of GATE No. 4.”
It was the summer season of 2023, and I’d gone to South Korea to observe Bong work on his seventh function movie, “Mickey 17,” a sci-fi action-adventure that includes Robert Pattinson, Mark Ruffalo, Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie and Toni Collette. Bong — or Director Bong, as he’s identified amongst Koreans and collaborators — is his nation’s highest-profile filmmaker, at residence and overseas. His final film, “Parasite” (2019), received 4 Academy Awards, together with finest image and finest director.
Bong is drawn to confrontational, tone-scrambling materials. “Irony and paradox,” he advised me at one level, are “the driving pressure for me after I make movies.” His type is to deploy style conventions whereas subverting them in audacious and ingenious methods. As he as soon as put it to a Korean interviewer, “No matter style I select, I intend to destroy it.”
His motion pictures are additionally enjoyable, which explains why Bong has loved a long term not solely of crucial acclaim but in addition industrial success. His 2006 monster-movie deconstruction, “The Host,” broke all Korean box-office data. Amongst its champions is not any much less of a genre-subverter than Quentin Tarantino, who likened Bong to “Spielberg in his prime.” “Parasite,” a home-invasion deconstruction, earned much more, planting him firmly within the pantheon of bankable modern auteurs.
Initially conceived for the stage, “Parasite” was a tightly centered Korean-language suspense story with an achingly ambiguous ending, no supernatural creatures and, until you depend its operatically grisly climax, zero motion sequences. “Mickey 17” is a unique beast fully. Primarily based on a 2022 novel by Edward Ashton, referred to as “Mickey7,” the movie is a few determined loser named Mickey Barnes, performed by Pattinson, who indicators onto the crew of a spaceship as a part of a marketing campaign of intergalactic colonization. He’s tasked with the crushing work of an “Expendable”: His recollections are uploaded in order that his consciousness may be put in, as typically as wanted, into endlessly reprintable replicas of his physique. These come in useful, as a result of his job consists of gulping down lung-liquefying airborne viruses and bathing himself in radiation, amongst different torturous and deadly work. At its core, Bong mentioned, “it’s a narrative about working-class individuals. And I used to be attracted by the concept that his job is dying.”
