“Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho serves up a dystopian adventure with an unlikely hero, and a bad guy who might seem a little…familiar.
It all begins when an egoistical, power-hungry villain named Marshall (Marc Ruffalo) seeks to populate a pristine, icy white planet with the purest human race, but he needs some help. He requires the aid of some hapless, down-on-their luck humans to pledge their lives to his cause.
They must travel to the new planet, living in service in the spaceship in sparse accommodations while Marshall and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) luxuriate in over-the-top abundance. The team’s job is to get things organized on their new planet so it’s safe to inhabit.
Enter Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson.) He gets the worst job of all because he failed to read the fine print. He has signed over his life as an “expendable,” which means that he’s subject to all sorts of deadly experiments, including, for example, breathing in highly toxic air. Each time he dies, he is reprinted on cloning technology that is banished on Earth. The hapless and saccharine Mickey has died 16 times to be exact. It doesn’t take us long to realize he’s pretty good at dying. The living part? We’re not sure yet.
Even so, each time he is faced with death, he resigns himself with a placating futility.
But not everyone is so affable. Nash (Naomi Ackie) is Mickey’s girlfriend, and she’s not shy about calling out Marshall on his narcissist and authoritarian ways. She also notes that the native inhabitants of the island–weird, squishy creatures that Marshall wants to exterminate–don’t really mean any harm. But he’s going to kill them anyway because they’re “aliens” and he doesn’t want them around.
Nasha points out that, on this new planet, Marshall and his people are the true aliens.
There are some contemporary references that are hard to miss. Marshall is a congressman turned CEO/pastor who has accumulated a cult-like following whose members sometimes wear red hats. While trying to coerce one of the females on the ship to be one of the key new colonists, she asks if she’s being used for her uterus. The insults to the native inhabitants of the planet also have a familiar ring. Then there’s Marshall’s strange “advisor,” who is always on hand to film Marshall’s staged grandeur, even as it drips in buffoonery.
But everyone has an important question for Mickey. What’s it like to die? He says it’s terrible and scary every time, no matter how many times he goes through it. Which sort of begs the question…is he really willing to die for this cause? Or maybe this new, authoritarian world isn’t really worth living for.
Movie Times: Click Here
Genre: Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy, Sci-Fi
Director: Bong Joon Ho
Actors: Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun, Michael Monroe, Patsy Ferran, Cameron Britton
Run Time: 2 hours 17 minutes
Rating: R
