“Mickey 17” is the first feature that Bong has made with a Hollywood studio, and his most expensive one yet, with a budget just under $120 million. On this last score, though, he was ambivalent. “I prefer small productions, and I dislike big productions,” he said. I’d heard chatter that when Warner Bros. greenlighted “Mickey 17,” the studio hoped it might spawn a new franchise, centered on a hero conveniently defined by his own potential for infinite undead sequelization. But Bong’s sensibility has proved consistently idiosyncratic in ways that fly against the logic of the multiplex. Most of his endings are depressing, and his English-language features, all of them science fiction, can feel especially strange, with heightened performances and a tonal volatility that has become his signature — a “switchback energy,” as Tilda Swinton, who has acted in two of his films, put it to me.
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