Why Good Directors Make Bad Movies

What makes a great movie? Is it the director or the writer? Is it the actors or the producers? The editors or designers? As obvious as it sounds: I believe it always has to be the story. Because for all the money and budget you can have, all the actors that you can get, the producers, editors, production designers that you can assemble, even with one of the best directors working in the industry, none of it, and I mean really none of it, matters if you have a bad story.

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What is Mickey 17?

Mickey 17 is a 2025 science fiction black comedy film written, produced, and directed by Bong Joon Ho, based on the 2022 novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton. The film stars Robert Pattinson in the title role, alongside Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo. Set in the future, the plot follows a man who joins a space colony as an "Expendable", a disposable worker who gets cloned every time he dies for research purposes.

Mickey 17 premiered at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival on February 15, 2025, before being theatrically released by Warner Bros. Pictures in South Korea on February 28, 2025, and later in the United States on March 7. The film received generally positive reviews from critics, with many highlighting Bong's direction and Pattinson's performances.

A film adaptation of Edward Ashton's novel Mickey7 was announced to be in development prior to its publication in January 2022, with Bong Joon Ho writing, directing, and producing for Warner Bros. Pictures and Robert Pattinson in talks to star. Charles Yu wrote additional literary material for the film. Bong was intrigued by the concepts presented in the book, though he made many changes to the characters, including modifying Mickey's personality to be a little more simple-minded. He wrote the screenplay in 2021 based on an early draft of the book, and said that none of the characters portrayed were meant to be mirroring active politicians. Robert Pattinson was the first actor to come to mind for a performance that required dual roles, and he agreed immediately to take the role after being offered it. Pattinson improvised many lines as Mickey 18, who starts with an aggressive personality, then grows as a person who wants to protect 17.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 78% of 281 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.2/10. The website's consensus reads: "Mickey 17 finds Bong Joon Ho returning to his forte of daffy sci-fi with a withering social critique at its core, proving along the way that you can never have too many Robert Pattinsons." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 72 out of 100, based on 59 critics, indicating "generally favourable" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale, while those surveyed by PostTrak gave it 4 out of 5 stars, with 63% saying they would definitely recommend the film.

Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph awarded the film 4 stars out of 5, noting: "As in much of Bong's work, its chop-and-change attitude to genre keeps his audience on their toes. The film veers from slapstick to absurdism to horror and back again, often within a single shot, such as the regular sight of the latest Pattinson clone flopping out of the meat printer with a sausagey flumph." Jacob Oller of The A.V. Club called the film "An unwieldy, long-winded, wildly entertaining sci-fi critique of our dehumanising present." In his review for NPR, critic Justin Chang wrote that the film's satire "wears awfully thin", but that "Bong is one of the few filmmakers who can work at this scale, with elaborate production design and intricate visual effects, and still retain his artistic signature."

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Видео Why Good Directors Make Bad Movies канала Motion In Art