It’s been five long years and possibly several lifetimes since Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2019 – a great movie year and the last one before the pandemic shifted the industry forever. This weekend, the singular South Korean filmmaker finally returns to theaters with Mickey 17, a big-studio sci-fi comedy from Warner Bros. At several points in the past year-plus, Warner seemed uncertain about how or when to release this strange but entertaining picture about an expendable worker (Robert Pattinson) who is repeatedly killed and cloned as a condition of his off-Earth employment. Though it’s hard to sympathize with a studio seemingly regretting giving money to a great filmmaker, it’s also possible that anyone introduced to Bong’s work via Parasite will find the sillier and more overtly wacky Mickey 17 a disorienting experience. Thematically, the two films are of a piece, but stylistically and tonally, Mickey 17 has more in common with Parasite’s immediate predecessor. So anyone thinking of catching the new Bong film might be better-prepared if they first seek out Okja, which is still streaming on Netflix, where it debuted as one of the company’s big-swing efforts to fund great filmmakers in the late 2010s.
Why Watch Okja Tonight?
Bong Joon-ho is know for mixing, matching, and riffing on familiar genres and reference points. His 2009 film Mother initially seems like a family drama that could morph into a courtroom thriller before revealing itself as a neo-noir mystery and psychological study. Mickey 17 recalls the lie-die-repeat rhythms of time-loop movies like Edge of Tomorrow before going off in a different direction. Okja, meanwhile, has hints of Studio Ghibli, Steven Spielberg, and Charlotte’s Web in following the friendship between young Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun) and a genetically modified, supersized pig, who Mija attempts to rescue from a nefarious meat company. Okja himself is a wonderful CG creation, cute but not cutesy, and a neat complement to the wilder monster from The Host. (There are more oversized, shuffling animal friends in Mickey 17.)
Don’t let that description mislead you; Okja has a darker edge than plenty of other kid-and-their-animal buddy pictures. Still, it’s probably the most family-appropriate of Bong Joon-ho’s oeuvre, with a more actively hopeful and sweet resolution than the more violent Snowpiercer or Parasite. It’s also, like Snowpiercer and Mickey 17, a co-production with Hollywood, which for Bong’s movies often means a bunch of familiar actors mugging up an absolute storm as they translate his one-of-a-kind stories into English. Not everyone adapts well to the freedom his movies afford them to act like absolute maniacs, at least in supporting roles; Mark Ruffalo in Mickey 17 and Tilda Swinton in Snowpiercer can both be filed under “perhaps too much.” Swinton is also doing a lot in Okja – she’s literally in a dual role, as the CEO of the bad company and her character’s twin sister – but she’s upstaged anyway by Jake Gyllenhaal, playing an unhinged TV zoologist, in one of his best Weirdo Mode performances. Checking out his work here prior to Mickey 17 is a mixed blessing; you’ll see this kind of over-the-top approach not working out nearly as well for certain cast members, but you’ll also see Gyllenhaal going nuts.
Still, the heart of the movie is the relationship between Mija and Okja, and, by proxy, the fragile relationship we hold (and often defy) with our animal counterparts. Yet the movie is too eccentric, too freewheeling, to feel especially preachy; Bong isn’t above staging a bravura chase sequence when Miha attempts to intercept a New York-bound Okja in Seoul. The pair do eventually wind up hitting the streets of New York; as with Snowpiercer (though less ostentatiously or bleakly than that globe-crossing supertrain), Bong uses his English-language co-production as an opportunity to cross international borders and take on globalized forms of social ills that particular countries might think of as their own. Okja ultimately points to a bigger world than what corporations should be able to control. Even if Bong doesn’t always land in a hopeful place, his movies don’t succumb to pure hopelessness. And if Okja isn’t his absolute best movie, it may be the best evidence that he believes a better world is possible.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
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