Mickey7
Another book-film combo as part of the Something Strange book club. The film1 is currently out in cinemas so this time I got to the book after the fact.
The bones of the story are the same, a guy is hired to carry out deadly space missions and is repeatedly cloned upon his death, but it’s super interesting to see the changes Bong Joon Ho decided to make in order to bring it to the big screen.
For one, Mickey seems a bit smarter here and more interested in history and science. The novel is all in the first person so to get any amount of scene setting or exposition it’s important that the main character understands his surroundings, and it has to be plausible that he is in a position to go off on long-ish tangents about the past. In the film the goal is more to flesh out an interesting on-screen persona, and to provide some comedic value.
Bong also chooses to have the ‘leader’ be more cult-like and more Trump or Musk-like. He gives him a wife, and has the humans hail from Earth whereas in the book they come from a fictional planet that has already been colonised, implying a long history of such attempts.
Anyway I digress, this is supposed to be about the book. And as a book it’s a funny tale of human hubris and fragility, and considers our desires to always expand and always run away from our problems no matter what the cost.
The chronology is chopped up elegantly, giving us little reveals of detail rather than being a tedious exercise in sci-fi franchise world building. The biggest shame is that it only feels like it truly gets underway in the last 50 pages or so. Yes there’s a sequel to the book, but rather than “leaving me wanting more” it left me feeling like it wasn’t quite a complete novel.
I’d still recommend this as a fun, original, well executed idea with a pleasingly dark and sardonic sense of humour.