My review of "Parasite" director's "Mickey 17"

Bong Joon-ho turns from satirizing South Korea to satirizing Trumpian America.

From my new movie review in Taki’s Magazine:

‘Mickey 17’: Where Bong Goes Wrong

Steve Sailer

March 12, 2025

With his new science-fiction satire Mickey 17, South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho is back with his first movie since he swept the Academy Awards for 2019 with his lucid-looking class-conflict film Parasite.

Granted, nobody writing in English has yet put forward a convincing explanation of what Parasite meant to say about the condition of the working class in South Korea. For example, why is the poor family defeated by simple paying tasks such as folding pizza boxes, but when they begin to infiltrate the CEO’s family by posing as American-educated art therapists and the like, they suddenly become as competent as the Mission: Impossible squad?

But, whatever…from the perspective of a half decade later, the film was clearly a high-class work of art. I can remember scenes from it as clearly as I can remember segments from Coen brothers movies, which is high praise from me.

Consider, for instance, the elegance of the rich family’s modernist mansion, which Bong largely concocted in CGI. If he hadn’t become Korea’s top director, Bong might have instead become its best architect.

Both Bong’s innate artistry and his progressive politics come with a blue-chip pedigree: His father was chairman of the art department at the National Film Institute, and his maternal grandfather was a distinguished novelist who defected to North Korea.

Read the whole thing there.