This message contains some spoilers For “Mickey 17.”
In the new science fiction film by Bong Joon Ho “Mickey 17”, Robert Pattinson played the Mickey holder, a low-remuneration growl on a distant spacecraft. As the overviews have made explicit, Mickey is a “consumable”, that is to say: when he dies, he can easily be cloned – or “printed” – and replaced in one day. Needless to say, Mickey is selected for the most dangerous missions of the ship. As the public catches up with him, he is on his 17th impression.
Mickey lives on a conservative cultural ship who loves a Trump type televangelist named Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo). Marshall is so hated on earth that he left on a long -distance spacecraft to find an interplanetary haven that he plans to call Niflheim. Throughout “Mickey 17”, he and his horrible wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) speak of how they are looking for a genetically pure stock, which clearly shows that they are evangelical eugenists. They are people who are rotten enough and have been clearly written as a wide metaphor but not really passed for the Modern American right wing.
When the ship landed on a potential planet of Niflheim – a world of frozen tundra – Mickey notes that it is only populated by a disproportionate species of arctic pillors. Insects are scary for Marshall, so he nicknamed them. He is happy to eradicate the lianas if he means that he can colonize Niflheim.
During his mission, Mickey falls into a crevasse and encounters a liana nest, terrified by their many legs and growled noises. But, perhaps unexpectedly, the Creepers do not eat Mickey (something he takes personally; he has a bad taste?), And save him by placing him on the surface. Curious. As the film progresses, Mickey realizes that Creepers are intelligent. Indeed, they have a language, names, families and a culture of their own.
A story of self-obeyed Christians traveling in a distant world, occupied by “frightening” natives which they aim to eradicate. Lianas are a clear science fiction metaphor for the victims of European and American colonialism.
Mickey 17 is a metaphor for colonialism
Without giving too much, the public ends up learning the depths of the Creepers intelligence. They are able to communicate and even seem to have a sense of humor. Kenneth Marshall, a D-Sac with ideas behind eugenics, considers them as nothing more than the vermin to kill in order to make room for his new “glorious” colony of whites, pseudo-Christians. Creepers, we can see, can represent anyone who has been attacked, eradicated or plundering by a certain number of oppressive colonialists throughout human history. It is the “savages” that must be “tamed”. Bong Joon Ho is barely subtle about this.
Because “Mickey 17” was manufactured by an American studio, it is easy to see the lianas as a metaphor of the people of the first nation of this continent, and Marshall as a replacement for the empitious American colonies. Marshall is constantly said that what he does is noble, mythical, grand. Mickey sees it for what it is: the slaughter devoid of meaning, based solely on the disgust of Marshall with their physical appearance.
Using extraterrestrials as a metaphor for oppressed people is not new, of course. There are many movies and television programs that threw humans as oppressive and extraterrestrial colonizers like their targeted “lower”. It was the premise of Neill Blomkamp’s film in 2009 “District 9”, an intelligently directed film which saw extraterrestrials in the shape of a bug forced to live in a ghetto district in the form of a discharge by the humans nearby. The same year, you could see James Cameron’s “Avatar”, the ultra-blockbuster on NA’VI, a sweet tribal species of blue giants of low technology that faced military eradication in the hands of high-tech human visitors obsessed with violence.
The film closest to “Mickey 17” can be the film by Paul Verhoeven in 1998 “Starship Troopers”, a film on the way in which a futuristic fascist human regime made war on giant intelligent extraterrestrial insects … without reason that we can say.
Aliens as a metaphor of oppressed people
Face and / or monstrous extraterrestrials are also often used in science fiction stories as a challenge for our humanity. In the cinematic version of 2013 of “Ender’s Game”, for example, children are trained in military tactics, intended for use at war against an off -screen species called Formics. This film ends with a shocking turn which reveals how far humanity had fallen in terms of the will to commit violence in wartime. He finally pleads for compassion and begs people to understand everyone, rather than using their “otherness” as an excuse to kill them. The author of the original novel of “Ender’s Game” should sit and read one day “Ender’s Game”.
Sometimes the metaphor becomes a little misty, however. James Cameron clearly wanted the public to sympathize with the NA’VI in “Avatar”, but we have less sympathy for xenomorphs in his 1986 “Aliens” film. This film focused on the humanist colonialist navies which are sent to a dangerous territory to exterminate the creatures which came to infest the place. However, they are surpassed and they all die. Cameron saw his film as a metaphor for the Vietnam War, although it is certainly not flattering to compare the Viet Cong with moster mosters. In “Aliens”, the meaning of the film collapses under control.
Looking at the Creepers in “Mickey 17”, a trekkie could also instantly think of the Horta, the extraterrestrials similar to the episode “The Devil in the Dark” (March 9, 1967). The Creepers and the Horta rush along the ground and have a dissecting appearance. In addition, the two are initially considered as animals, easy to exterminate like vermin by human intruders. In both cases, extraterrestrials emerge not only as intelligent and capable of communication, but motivated by a strong feeling of family preservation. It is a big episode, which only lacks female characters.
Thus, “Mickey 17” joins a prestigious company with its lianas. They are not only “frightening extraterrestrials”. They are part of a film tradition.
