Mickey 17: (Jung Jae-il) There was so much promise
in the 2025 South Korean and American production of
Mickey 17
that you have to wonder where acclaimed director Bong Joon Ho went
wrong. Adapting a popular 2022 novel, the director couldn't decide the
extent to which his movie would be a science fiction adventure, a black
comedy in space, and a political commentary about cloning and
authoritarianism. He tried to straddle all those genres in telling of a
pair of desperate earth losers who join a mission to colonize another
planet in 2054 (so soon?) and find themselves on a crusade with a future
version of Donald J. Trump in the lead. One of the men, Mickey, becomes
the "expendable" crewman who is repeatedly and casually killed at his
tasks and cloned with his prior memories intact. The crusaders land on
another planet that is inhabited by bugs, which naturally turn out to be
the protagonists, along with a few of the humans that stand up to the
evil leaders of their ship. The significant potential in the cloning
element and love affair that crosses multiple lives entices, but asinine
humor and ridiculous villains leave
Mickey 17 without much of a
soul by the end. Critics found it interesting, but audiences largely
shunned it, causing Warner Brothers a short-term loss projected around
$100 million. This project wasn't Bong's first venture into the American
realm of filmmaking, and for 2013's
Snowpiercer, he had enlisted
the help of composer Marco Beltrami for that movie's score. More
recently, he had teamed with South Korean composer Jung Jae-il on
Okja and the highly popular
Parasite in the late 2010's.
Despite his work on a variety of Korean film scores for two decades,
Jung is better known for his music in the television series "Squid Game"
in the 2020's, which he was parlaying into American scoring assignments
by 2025. His musical career has spanned a variety of genres, from jazz
to folk to new age and orchestral, emerging originally as a bassist in a
few bands when young. His approach to
Mickey 17 is as unusual as
the topic of the film, throwing a host of genres at the canvas for an
occasionally fascinating mashup of tones that most often, unfortunately,
yield to understated solo piano atmospheres.
Jung makes no attempt to imitate or even truly
represent the idea of cloning in his music for
Mickey 17, nor is
there anything to convey that the film exists in the future science
fiction realm, staying organic throughout. He seems to have decided that
neoclassicism is the base from which all the divergent sideshows in the
score would emanate. The instrumentation is guided mostly by piano and
strings, with specialty instruments thrown in rarely; contributors like
accordion, fiddle, saxophone, and xylophone are mostly confined to the
glitziest of cues. The personality of the work is softly sarcastic,
using its faux elegance to punctuate the ridiculousness of the film's
plot. The thematic breadth is extremely diverse, but Jung still manages
to create an oddly boring score that is too reliant upon extended,
melancholy solo piano passages. The highlights of the work all come in
the full ensemble and choral sequences, the London Symphony Orchestra's
contributions fantastic in the limited time during which they
contribute. Each part of the score is too disparate to form a whole
outside of the common waltz portions that guide the two main themes. The
first of these ideas represents the journey of the characters as a
whole, though it could alternately be considered a love theme for Mickey
and Nasha. Its waltz formation is as clinical as it is cold, conveying
absolutely no warmth for these characters even though they definitely
show that spark of fire against the plethora of other, completely
careless crewmates. The main theme is heard on solo piano throughout the
sparse "Bon Appetit" and returns in similar fashion in "Nasha" but with
a string quartet added early and the full strings striking some depth
late. The quartet and piano mode doesn't develop any further in
"Ulsang," and the same sour atmosphere applies to "Bon Appetit with
Strings." Meanwhile, a theme of despair for the movie is its most
versatile and is adapted extensively across genres. This different,
darker waltz formation for the full ensemble emerges in "Immigrant" and
expands into a bloated, melodramatic moment of comedy in "Vaccine." A
piano solo pounds away at it in "Multiple" while a rowdier tango
personality diverts the idea significantly in "Attention." Increasingly
ominous in "Arrival," this idea revisits its piano-pounding mode in
"Corridor of Love," where it is joined by surprising brass
muscularity.
The secondary themes in
Mickey 17 offer little
to the narrative, each rather mundane in their extension of the work's
overall depressing mood. A theme for Mickey himself struggles to define
itself in the soul-infused solace from solo piano in "Barnes" but never
goes anywhere from there. A theme for his love interest, Nasha, debuts
its ascendant solo piano figures in the short "Nasha is Amazing I" and
interjects on solo piano at the end of "Chaos," but that piano recurs in
"Nasha is Amazing II" and is never joined by another instrument during
any of its performances. A theme for the "creepers" that are the
sentient bugs of the target planet consists of droning throat singing on
key in "Why Kill Luco?" and develops into a fuller choral chant in
"Chaos." The far more successful portions of
Mickey 17 come when
Jung unleashes his action material that doesn't really connect to any of
the surrounding themes but still spices up the mood. These explosions of
sound are thus more like comedy vignettes than actual culminations of
anything heard in the remainder of the score. The outrageous polka of
"Mayhem" resurrects memories of Danny Elfman's
Pee-wee's Big
Adventure and its sequel, with silly vocals building to a massive,
pompous choral conclusion. More impressive are pulsating brass figures
over perhaps slightly synthetic reminders of early James Horner
brutality in "Set Off." Similar volume immediately follows in the
crescendo of huge orchestral and choral force that builds at the end of
"Chaos." These cues at the climax are really engaging and interesting,
but that payoff comes after too many dull expressions of the score's
main theme and non-descript, outright boring cues like "Frog," "Umma,"
and "Calm Before the Storm." There was nothing wrong with the idea of
using a restrained and solitary waltz as the origination point for this
score's comedy, but Jung never pushes that sound in any meaningful
direction. Even as parody music, the demeanor may be too stuffy to
suffice. That striking minimalism was likely the intent all along, but
it makes for a challenging listening experience even if it serves the
film's off-kilter personality well enough. The 49-minute album drags
considerably but is never unpleasant, making for an easy but forgettable
listening experience outside of the terrible and sickening religious
source song for the villains in "Rejoice in the Lord" at the
presentation's end. Like the film itself, there was too much potential
for a really fantastic parody here that was left unexplored, despite the
impressive action at the climax.
@Amazon.com: CD or
Download
- Music as Written for the Film: ***
- Music as Heard on Album: **
- Overall: ***
There exists no official packaging for this album.
