Mickey 17 (2025) — "I messed with a lab frog. I just figured this all must be my punishment."

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He's vee, I'm fine Tomorrow, Nikki seventeen only Theeter's March seven ticket Sancil. Now, Hello everyone, and welcome to the Culture Cast. I am still your host, Christashue, much to the chagrin of some, and I am joined by my two good friends all the way from where, well somewhere out there in radio land, uh Korean k pop historian Miranda, and also joining us all the way from well, he's he's all the way out there in God's Country, West Texas. Y'all, Doctor David D. Pro Mutter the d is important.

He's here too, Thank you, Chris. And I drug both of y'all kicking and screaming into this. Not kicking, not screaming, but I mean it it. I'm so excited to hear what doctor pearl Mutter has to say, just because he kind of buried the lead initially by saying, I have thoughts. But I'm also I'm actually really excited because, uh, Miranda, the connection or you to this and us to this film ostensibly was you had the idea to do Train to Boussan, which then led to me going, oh, I haven't seen Mickey seven, which seventeen based on Mickey seven, which is a Bong June Ho film, and he's I would say for most Westerners, he's like, if you know a Korean director, he's probably the only one I would assume, just based on the parasite of it all.

So this was kind of an idea of mine. So I apologize in advance if neither of y'all liked the film. However, on this episode of the Culture Cast, we are talking about Mickey seventeen, a film that came out last year, directed by Bong June Hoe and starring well, one of my favorite actors, and I kid you not, I genuinely find Robert Pattinson to be one of the most intriguing actors I think who's working right now. Robert Pattinson plays him, I would say, plays himself, but he's kind of always doing a riff on his general being. He plays Mickey Barnes and expendable, a man who goes to and essentially dies every day or every couple days, or whenever they need him to because he is inexpendable, which means they can just reprint him.

So he goes and does dangerous jobs or becomes a lab rat, and it's the film explores it in a holistic way that I think is very interesting because it's not at all what I was expecting. But in a lot of ways that's a very good thing. But it is a sci fi comedy. Question Mark, I'm very curious where y'all come in with the thoughts on the film. But Miranda, I will kick it to you first, what did you think of Mickey seventeen?

And also, because I assume we're close in age, thoughts on Robert Pattinson. Well, I you would think it, but I actually was not a huge Twilight fan when I was younger. So my first introduction to him, and this is probably true for most people, was Harry Potter. Say, I assume a dream Boats. I agree.

I just thought it was going to be Harry Potter. I was not alluding to Twilight. I think his most famous role is probably Edward in tri Twilight. I think isn't that unfortunate? And he really he should be better known for his perfect performance, has such a degree in the Harry Potter movies, and he has come a long way since then.

He's famous now. He's famous enough now that he can take on really any project he wants through name alone. And he's one of those interesting characters that just seems to enjoy being in movies for the sake of being in movies. He doesn't seem to be a cloud o fame chaser. He really enjoys what he does, and that has He's been involved in some really interesting stuff, including Mickey seventeen, which I had mixed feelings about.

I obviously thought he was fantastic. He was so solid the whole time, especially with that sort of whiny. It wasn't irritating quite but it was perfect for his character, who's extremely meek and just absolutely trampled over the entire movie by everybody, with the exception mostly of his girlfriend Nasha, including Mickey eighteen the second or eighteenth I guess version of him, who by a mistake a weird era in the system, which I found to be both funny because just like in the comedy part of the of the film, like ugh, I don't know how to say this, but he like a bureaucracy era like that happening feels very realistic, even in sci fi advanced future like this where we want to have the planets. I thought that was Terry Gilliam kind of Yeah, that.

Was definitely a layered element, very comedic element. But he he's he's again great. Like when you have a character that's playing two different people technically because their characterizations were very different, he was. He was just absolutely melted into each role. You could tell he was this cocky, super erratic, chaotic person versus Mickey seventeen, who just he always had like the hunt shoulders and the quavering voice and eyes that like great animal eyes that were always looking around nervously at the people around him.

So yeah, he was just probably the highlight of the home movie for me, all right, Doctor Pearl mutter. Well sort of similar to the comments I made about The Witch, but maybe more intense. Oh dear, oh dear. If you want to know what he's talking about, go listen to that episode. We watched Robert Edgars The Witch, and I said, what I'm going to say now is that when the screen credits roll for Mickey seventeen, I believe almost everybody there deserves a standing ovation.

I was looking at the film and I was going like, the step design is really good. I mean, the spaceship wasn't some really completely clever new design of a spaceship that I'd never seen before. But it looked like a lived in spaceship. It looked like, Okay, this is what they would Probably it probably should have been bigger if they were actually going to another planet in setting up a colony, but like, it was well done, and the costumes were well done, the weather and the other planet, the creature effects. I mean, it's very, very hard, after thousands of Star Trek episodes and thousands of movies to come up with like an original alien or an alien that actually feels alien in its culture and it's sort of outlook.

And I actually thought cgi Alien, whatever they did looked good, and the psychology of the aliens look good. I just one a couple of small things, like, as Branda was pointing out, one of the conceits of the film is that they can three D print a human certain humans. There's a whole subplot about why only certain humans and not others. But when you physically see him being printed the first time out of this sort of cat scan looking machine, I love the little touch they have that he doesn't just come out like a fresh sheet of paper from a laser printer. He comes out like from a dot matrix printer that I'm old enough to remember.

Where he comes out just a little bit, and then he has to go back and they have to do a little bit more. I know that's actually like three D printing today, where they have to like go move, move back. But that was just a great little touch, and so everything worked for me except the plot. Going back to Robert Pattinson Academy Award, I mean I would have legitimately voted for him. He played two distinctive roles.

He played. The toughest assignment for an actor is to play, for a ninety percent of the movie a really irritating character that you sort of want to feel sorry for, you want to sympathize with and empathize with, but he's just so meek and passive and accepts his fate that you sort of like, go, okay, I guess they're just gonna kill him again. He pulls that off, and then he pulls off, by the way, very good special effects, pulling off his not evil twin but his sort of decisive like every quality we wish a hero had in a movie twin who you know eventually gets revenge on the bad guys. So just everything was. Great except I felt that this was trying to say something to me that I felt was so simplistic that it that maybe I missed the complicated, complex, nuanced message of this movie because it felt like so much farce and satire.

And Tony Collette is one of the great actresses of our lifetime. I am a huge fan of Tony Collette. Until this movie, I would have said there is no role Tony Collette cannot pull off with magnificence and glory. She was told to mug gear and she is spending almost the entire movie pretending to be a bad actress mugging in a high school play. I have so many notes for the studio, but I will let you instruct me both.

Thank you. I kind of I think where I come at this movie obviously, is I mean, I'm not gonna pretend like I don't like Robert Pattinson enough to see everything that he's in because I don't like him that much. I like him a fair amount, but I unless unless doctor Perlmutter, You're like I'd like to talk about the Odyssey. I will be skipping Matt film because it's just not some for me. And so Robert Pattinson is an actor I like a fair amount, But there are some things where I'm like, Okay, I'm just not interested.

This was not one of those things. This was something that I just kind of missed because the last two years of my life have been hectic, to say the least, and I haven't had time to just sit and watch movies, which has kind of changed in the last six to seven months, so I'm able to just kind of sit and get back into the swing of podcasting and doing things. And I had seen the preview for this movie. I kind of didn't realize it was a comedy. I didn't know what it was just based on the poster and I didn't watch the preview for it until a couple weeks ago, and that's when I was like, Oh, we should you know, talk about this.

So I didn't know really what to expect tone wise with the movie going into it. But I think for me and I am in more agreement with you on this film, Doctor Promutter than I think we were in terms of The Witch, which is this movie I think creates a really interesting world, and it creates a lot of really fun concepts that could be moved further by someone else, or even Bong June Hoe with another film, because Mickey seventeen is based on a book called Mickey seven, which already has a sequel book, and so the sequel book deals with what is it like now for the guy who could just die and come back to life to have to live knowing he can't just die again and come back to life, which is interesting. This movie never even touches that, not to the extent that it should, not to the extent that to your point, doctor Pearl Mutter, it could actually give a film that's fun.

It could actually give the film some substance, and it could give the film some some punch and some weight. You know, Miranda, when you were talking about kind of the bureaucratical farce of it all with you know, like in Brazil we have the moth getting into the machine, in this we have you know, it's just a clerical error. If you're gonna approach that and go down that route, you really need to like lean further into it and don't just have it be the inciting incident because there's so much to I'm here that they kind of just allude to and I honestly don't understand. And this is and again, either one of you step in and tell me he's completely out of line here. The worst part of this movie is everything to do with the aliens on the planet.

It's not remotely interesting the concepts that they've introduced in terms of like the cloning and the expendables and what does that mean. And then they have this like whole cutaway kind of exposition pause where they're talking about how did they figure out and deal with the clones on Earth? It was because there was a guy who was murdering people and they couldn't figure out how he was doing it. It's because he had created a clone of himself and was alive, and so they have now rules and things against multiples. That to me was the more interesting idea in this movie.

And I don't, for the life of me understand why. I was like, well, the more interesting part is the dialogue that they're having with the aliens on the planet. Like that for me was the hitting the nail way too hard on the head moment of the movie where the Mark Ruffalo and the gas the aliens of it all was just like, this is just it's gonna date this movie. If this movie had come out thirty years ago, it'd probably be a different person or a different group of people being parodied or you know, farsically taken down. But now that we're living in this time, and you can see when this movie came out, parts of this movie are going to date this movie unnecessarily, when the parts of this movie that were interesting could have literally had nothing to do with those characters, because those characters are tied up in that plot more or less entirely.

Mark Ruffalo and Tony Collett are completely tied up in the alien subplot more or less the entire movie. And I found that to be, to your point, doctor Pearl Mutter kind of knock great and for me, Tony Collette as an actress is amazing. United States are tara hereditary. I mean, I mean, and those are just two things that are rather well known. I could continue, but there's no point in continuing to list all the movies that she's done that are great, because it's like pretty much all of to your point, doctor pro Mutter, this is the first time I've seen her in something where I'm like, I what a waste of a like what a waste of Mark Ruffalo and Tony Collette frankly like, they don't really give either one of them much to do other than be really sloppily done caricatures in a way that even an actor of Mark Ruffalo, who I love and one of my favorite movies, Zodiac, even someone like him and someone like Tony Collette can't elevate any of that.

Now, all of that said, Robert Pattinson's amazing to your point, Miranda. He disappears into both of those roles in a way that is not only impressive, but if you're an actor, you would want to watch this film if you're being asked to do something similar to understand how to really bring some nuance to a role like this, because he's playing this two different characters, but there's nothing that differentiates them visually until about the last third of the movie, and they get a lot of mileage out of that in some respect, but they really feel like two distinct, unique characters, and it's because they are such strong characterizations in both directions. Mickey seventeen is so kind of and the term I would use is squirrely and Mickey eighteen is really, like you said, doctor Promutter, He's kind of everything you would want.

He's very machiavellian, is what. It kind of strikes me as like he just, you know, he understands what needs to happen and he's willing to do it because that's what needs to happen, and sometimes you need someone like that. And I mean, I think the movie gets there in the end. I'm just not sure that we needed like two and a half hours to get to that point, because the movie's also a litle long in the tooth for not really It's like sitting down to play a board game that by the end of it there's only like two scoring options as opposed to four or five. It's like I spent two and a half hours on a game that's only got two scoring options.

I really am disappointed by a movie that spends a lot of time to say nothing or think it says something. And this movie kind of, for me, at its worst, is one of those kinds of movies. But at its best, it's really an opportunity for Robert Pattinson to flex a muscle that acting is hard. Acting against yourself as another character feels like something that is a task only someone who's either insane or terribly self confident in their ability as an actor would do. Because there I can tell you all of the bad body swap or clone or acting opposite yourself movies that exist out there, and boyd the bad ones outnumber the good ones tenfold.

So I think I come in kind of maybe at the point of this movie's okay, But for me, Robert Pattinson, I think almost gets lost in the equation by a movie that's kind of unnecessarily loud with a subplot that's not super interesting. I want to go back to something you said the beginning. I have a lot of thoughts about and I mostly agree with everything that you just said, that the creatures being a kind of a necessary element when there was so much more that could have been worked with that was present in the story. I think about this before, but they are. First of all, I hated that scene where they were talking with the creatures.

I thought that that was just so I mean, even though it's the future and it's science or whatever, I just was like, I'm taken out of this sci fi story because I don't believe they can just make something up that you can communicate with this completely inhuman animal. Yeah, it's an oxygenian refrigerator. Yeah, I don't know, like we can bree with classes that I can. I can do this because I've got a lab coat. So I hated that so much.

I didn't necessarily mind like having the creatures, but there was something about it that bothered me. And then when you were mentioning that, I realized it was because they're kind of a repetitive. First of all, it's like a bunch of creatures and they all represent one character. And it's kind of a repetitive character because we already have a character who's vulnerable and needs protection, which is Mickey seventeen. Like he's already this you know, talked about before.

He's just so oppressed by everybody around him that we don't really need him to save something else. He needs to save himself from this system that's just using him without any respect for his autonomy or safety or comfort. And again, it's almost to this movie's detriment that it had Robert Pattinson in it at all, because he's, as you said, she's sort of wasted. I mean, you have somebody who's capable of pulling this off. And while he did a wonderful job.

You can see maybe there was sort of some structure that was meant to be in the plot about how the machiavellian Mickey was supposed to teach him to stand up for himself more and you know, teach him to take control of his life. Ultimately, the Mickey seventeen that exists at the beginning of the movie is no different from the one at the end. He just has more friends and they change the laws, and he just has a really great girlfriend who's willing to defend him. But he hasn't grown as a character. He just doesn't have any arc, and they had a wonderful opportunity to do that with a version it literally himself to show him it's entirely possible for you to be stronger, both for yourself and for the people around you.

There could have been a moment where like he had to save Nasha's life or somebody else's or maybe you know, the ship was in danger and he had to be the one to do something, and then everyone it makes sense, everyone turns around their opinion of him. But having Makavelian Mickey sacrificed himself in that way, having him get to be the one where he has this like this moment of success and like really stealing what I think should have been like Mickey seventeen's moment of being a hero, which he never got. So I also his sacrifice was totally pointless. He could have just killed Mark Ruffalo. He didn't have to die, So I don't know why I was framed as if he was giving up his life when he was just doing the same thing that he'd done the whole film, which is theoretic, right, So I said.

They only needed to have one die, but we're just gonna have two die just because anyways, because it because well and I think it's one of those again, it's very problematic of a film that resorts to tired tropes these set you know, I'm in a position of sacrifice. Was like Mark Ruffalo is not even a physical threat to Robert Pattinson. That's why they have that kind of climax of the movie and the way that it does where he just blows himself up. Because if they get into a fistfight, it's like all those steven Sagall movies that Doctor Peerlmutter and I love so much that feature steven Sagall punching the final villain in the throat and killing him in one hit. There's no fight, there, there's no physical threat.

There's no oh. I I totally believe that this guy is a physical threat to Robert Pattinson, not remotely. And it's weird because because they really focus on leaning into the creepers and these creatures on the planet, and you kind of alluded to it a little bit, Miranda, and I'm sure that this is probably ultimately what they wanted, which is this one voice representing the many returns to the idea of Mickey seventeen kind of being a I don't know what you would call it, but a kind of homunculous of every other existence and experience that he's ever had, which is an interesting idea because human beings, as if your introspective about yourself and are self aware, like we go through phases in our life and are different versions of ourself, which doesn't literally you don't literally die, but if you get better in life and are caring about yourself and taking care of yourself with your mental health, you can grow as a person and kill that version of yourself as it were.

And I think it's an interesting way of looking at it. I don't know if the movie's going for that or not. I'm not sure it even approaches that in any meaningful way, but you can tell that it wants to somewhat have that conversation, because at the end of the movie we get a weird dream sequence cut away with Tony Kollett that and I kids you not. When I went and read the Wikipedia synopsis just to refresh myself before we started the episode, it makes no sense. Even in a Wikipedia synopsis.

It's just like, what the hell are we? Why? Okay, when did this become a horror movie all of a sudden? With the fake out ending, It's it's so strange and unearned, but it's again, it's I think it's the movie kind of attempting to punch through that wall of like we have something to say here, there's some meaning or point to all of this, and it doesn't get there. And because it doesn't get there, it just it really stumbles in a way that I wasn't expecting from a Bong June Ho film.

That's for sure. I think you've both made a case that there are, by my account anyway, six or seven interesting movies that have been like a weirdly shaped odd train, you know, linked together, and any one of them might have been something that made narrative sense. And let's just take this one point about bodies, right. So I have seen in the past the least favorite episode of the original Star Trek was when Captain Kirk goes to the transporter, and that it's been replicated, I think on every Star Trek series since then. And he split into two halves one one one nature and one and another and there've been versions of this and a lot of science fiction before and after Star Trek.

That was a really interesting episode. I think it was the New twilight Zone with Bruce Willis called shatter Day. Shatter Day, not Saturday, but shatter Day, based on Stephen king short story work. You are. I covered that many years ago on an episode of a show, Okay, shock Case, so I would not have any reference for that.

Otherwise, somebody splits into their themselves, but their character splits in two and one has more tendencies of one thing or another, And so that that was a really interesting thing here is because we're not we're given a couple of rules about the conscious of these mickeys, like, okay, they have they have all these wires, which really looks silly that in the future they can upload brains, but like they don't have Wi Fi, you know, but anyway, they they update people's memories. But I guess it's sort of random. I mean, for sixteen seventeen Minnikkis, he basically has the exact same temperament in character and like outlook on everything, and then suddenly on eighteen he splits off into the like like every deterministic, you know, strong will, you know, refusing to take any terrible thing, all the terrible things you just you know, rebellious streak suddenly appears in eighteen and that's never explained, and it's okay not to explain it.

But it just again. Felt this whole movie felt like it wasn't a movie as much as those marionettes on strings where people were just you know, wiggled over to one spot, did something, and wiggled over to another spot, and that was another. Part of it. But then you said something else, Chris picking up also on Miranda. Is that so with that, we could have had this really interesting movie about you know, different versions of yourself and how do you resolve that and do you jump into some sort of consolation because we all have different natures, you know, within ourselves.

Alexander Sultzenitsan once said, you know, if we could just only have evil people and then we would know who the evil people are. But there's evil and good in everyone, which I mean, yeah, I think in some people there's one hundred and ninety nine point nine percent of evil. But it's essentially true. And as you're alluding to, Chris, entire religions are based on the idea of recycle, like you're reborn and you get another chance to get it better, right, to be a better person in the rebirth and the reborn. I think that's an element in without the reincarnation.

Part of a lot of religions is you know, you you're supposed to go through life and get better, not not get worse. So there's this really interesting world there, and then these other plots the I mean, let's just face it, the entire plot with Mark Ruffalo and Tony Collette didn't need to. Be in the movie. It was another movie, a satire. I guess they thought they were being super clever and making some you know, devastatingly interesting point.

The Aliens, although I liked them, as aliens didn't need to be in this film, as Miranda was saying, it's just irrelevant to the plot. It just felt like, man, it's forty five minutes in and we've been repeating ourselves, need a new subplot to be introduced. Some of the minor characters as well, some of the women on the spaceship, like they're introduced, they say something, and then, like a Steven Sagow movie, you never hear from them ever again, except you know, in the coda or something like that. Just it really. Felt so splintered without a unified vision, which you'd think you'd have with an Academy Award winning director getting to write his own film, that you would have that unity of purpose.

Which is a because for the most part with the Bong June Hoe films I've seen, they do feel that way. Even something and I mentioned it when we talked on the last episode the three of us did together on the host. He directed that that movie is wildly interesting as a kaiju movie essentially, but yet it goes interesting places, does interesting things, and again written and directed, I mean, he didn't write. He's not the only writing credit on it, but he's one of three snow Piercer. I would say similarly, is an interesting movie.

Obviously, Parasite speaks for itself, and I would say, if you've seen Oakja, it's interesting enough. I think Oakja is somehow more of an interesting movie than this one is in terms of just not that it's a bad or good movie, but it just kind of sometimes you can go far afield with things and bring it all back at the end. You can authors do it all the time because the written word is seemingly easier to do that in a way, and the people that are really good at it. I guess when you're writing, you're given a lot more space and you can just create as much as you want because writing costs effectively nothing. Creating a film costs a lot of money.

And so this movie's long enough where to your point, doctor pearl Mutter, they could have done anything, and they clearly kind of did. It's almost like they did too much and didn't focus enough on just here are the three ideas. Let's kind of figure out how we can connect them in the center somehow and bring them together as seemingly three disparate ideas that are unified at the end. Let's see if we can do that, not let's cast a net as wide as we can over like ten different things. And there's Steve Ewan, Like, why is Steve Ewen in this movie?

Jesus, I couldn't tell you, Like, there's there's so much about this movie that when you take a step back from other than the fact that it has a lot of really good actors in it, they're just not given much to do. They And you know Naomi Aki, who I love as well in everything I've seen her, and she's actually for as bad as that last Star Wars movie is that she's in. He's not bad in it. I just again, they don't even give her anything to do. She's just kind of bailing out Mickey at every chance.

And it's so odd to me because again, this is essentially a character piece, at least it's supposed to be. When you have an actor playing two roles, I don't know what the expectation is going to be. Otherwise, they have Robert Pattinson showing up, but I don't think the script shows up for him. And it's such a bummer because I don't know the next time you're gonna get Robert Pattinson and Tony Collett and Mark Ruffalo on the screen together, and the fact that we have this scene with them towards the end of the movie that again, it's interesting, but everybody is just they're all coming in it from coming into it from a different movie tonally, and especially Mark Ruffalo and Tony Collette. When they're in scenes with Mark Ruffalo or with Robert Pattinson, it's jarring in a way that I feel like Bong June Hoo is like see see, like I'm keeping the audience on their toes and I'm just like, you know, to what end a are you doing that?

And is it successful? For me? It's not successful. Going and looking at the reviews of the film and the kind of critical feedback, the film was rather well received, but there were people that felt similarly to myself that the movie's just kind of all over the place because it is. And I also again don't really vibe with Mark Ruffalo's character because and you mentioned it, doctor Pearlmutter with twilight Zone, and I'm going to talk about the most recent iteration of the twilight Zone.

Most recent iteration of the twilight Zone had and I kid you not an episode where a child Jacob Tremblay. As a it would have been like, maybe mid teens is elected President of the United States. Get it. Get it? Everybody like, oh my God, like it.

I as someone who grew up on Star Trek and Twilight Zone, the original series of Star Trek and the original Twilight Zone and then the twentyand Twilight Zone, those sci fi kind of I would say franchises or intellectual properties are so important even now because Rod Serling and Gene Roddenberry knew how to craft. For the most part. I'm not gonna say Rod Serling always knew what he was doing anymore than Roddenberry did. But they understood the idea of human nature being timeless, and that will carry through a story all the way to the end, because human beings are never gonna change. Human beings are always going to be greedy and spiteful and mean.

But like you said, doctor Perlmutter, are also kind and gracious and amazing and empathetic, and so that dichotomy, the back and forth is important to have in any good drama, black comedy. In this film's probably self professed case, I just don't think that this film hits the highs that it thinks it's hitting, but it definitely hits the lows that it's trying to avoid. I would definitely say that Bonchinho has a track record of this snow Piercer. I mean, you can kind of see elements of this in like previous movies, Snow Piercer, which was a decent film, definitely better than Nicky seventeen, but still similarly too much analogy and not enough plot, too much open endedness and not enough groundedness.

Parasite is obviously the perfect balance of the two and where it's subtle and where it has both like physical and verbal and sort of cues that you can pick up on both in your first watch, and then there are things that you can notice rewatching the film over and over. There's nothing that you could take away from Mackey seventeen that you didn't see the first time, except perhaps more just exhausted at having to watch more fast performance again. And you know, he did a wonderful job, but it was it was very exhausting, So there was just there was absolutely no it felt like there was no restraint from Bong Juneo, which he has had in past, like Mother, which I actually didn't know when I watched it that he directed it.

It's a beautifully quiet film, and it proves that he's fully capable of good twins, which I'm not gonna spoil it because that's not the movie that we're talking about, but it's it's very funny to me with the history that he has of both probably indications of his not so great Some of his instincts are obviously very excellent, as proven by some of the past decisions that he's made, but I feel none of none of the ones that made one Oh my god, let me start over. I'm sorry for no, no, no, do not apologize it? Yeah? Do you want apologize? Nothing to apologize.

Ju and Hoe obviously has wonderful instincts for creating subtle allusions to class distinctions or whatever else he's criticizing in the film. It's from what I've seen, he's very critical of wealth disparity, and that's that's element in this movie as well. But I feel for some reason that he just he was uninhibited in this film, possibly because of his past success and none of the subtle tea that made his other movies like Mother or Snow Piercer or Parasite so excellent and well balanced with all the metaphorical stuff made it into this movie, and that's in mostly why it's just such a it's such a difficult watch for two whole hours of this justsconstant barrage of him smacking you in the face.

It is two and a half hours of a bit much. Yeah, let me pick up on something, Chris, just on Miranda's point there about subtlety, and I'm a big fan of that. If you have a message that an old studio mogul made the famous comment like, if if you want a message, call Western Union. I think I need to explain that to people who are half my age. That Western Union was a company that sent something called a telegram, which was a way of sending messages on a piece of paper.

That the guy with a bicycle would come to your house because you've got a telegram saying, you know, you have been drafted into the US Army. But if you're going to have a message in a movie, that's that's fine. Kasablanca, one of the great films ever made, has a strong message about America, especially nineteen forty two, facing a global crisis and coming together to fight evil. I mean, it had a message and but it told that message in a clever way, with a beautiful plot that carried you along. Here, I felt really like I was paying more attention than the filmmakers.

Let me just give you one example. Okay, so for a good deal of the film, and I didn't clock it, but let's just say for me, for about half of the film, everybody on the entire Space Expedition there, the Colonial Expedition. Everybody, with a few exceptions, I guess Nasha and a couple of the other women characters were despicable. There was a young lab tech woman lab Tech, who was sort of feeling guilty about treating Mickey so badly, and she tried to help a couple of times. But basically, out of a couple hundred people there, including Steven EU and his friend, there treat Mickey horribly.

They torture him. These are worse than These are the Nazi doctors. These are the Japanese unit seven eighty one, you know, that performed medical experiments on Chinese prisoners and civilians. I mean it just these are the worst humans in the history of the world equivalent for the first half of the movie, and nobody is stopping this. Nobody is saying huh.

You know, Mickey is a human, maybe we shouldn't be torturing him like that. And then the movie ends with like a happy ending out of some like nineteen seventies rom com or something like that, where almost everybody lives, including the faction that was supporting the allegedly you know, horrible leaders still there and they're still voting in the parliament, you know, at the end there, right, So like it would be like a movie like, Okay, we have a spaceship and ninety percent of the people in the spaceship are nineteen forty three Nazis. But then when they get to the other planet, you know, everything sort of works out and let's all live together and forget about the past and move on. And I'm going on, wait a minute, you forgot.

It's like somebody forgot to remind them the characterization that they had established. And on the new planet, I guess you know, they're just going to have you know, the Fourth Reich or something like that. Whatever. It just showed, and Miranda's word was correct. You said the same thing, Chris, is like a lack of restraint, the lack of any sense of like does this make sense?

Should this be in the movie. Was there were there producers who wrote notes and memos. I don't know. I just felt that I was watching seven or eight movies and they just said, Okay, we'll keep it all. You know, no editing.

You mentioned seventies films, and I think it's very funny, Doctor Perlmutter. Do you remember many moons ago? One might even say in a previous lifetime. One of the films that you and I talked about very early on was Soilent Green. Yes, this movie wishes it was Soilent Green.

It wishes it had something to say the way Soilent Green did about disposable humans in sight and what does that mean in a sci fi world? And that movie, for so many people is only remembered for the twist at the end. But there's so much that that movie has to say, so much even now about class disparity, about income inequality, and the way human beings will turn on one another when you know, when push comes to shove. This movie again wishes it had the nuance that something like a Soilent Green did. And it's such a bummer for me because, again, Miranda, you mentioned a lot of Bong June whole films that are very good that he worked on and directed or wrote and directed.

For the most part, up until Parasite and Mickey seventeen, he had released a film every couple years. He waited six years between Parasite and Mickey seventeen, and I know that there was a pandemic in there, But boy, what a lackluster next entry as a director after you win the Academy Award to have this be the movie that you release comparatively to Parasite. Obviously, this movie is no Parasite, but even comparatively to something that I think this movie would like to be compared to, like a Soylent Green, this movie is not even In that same conversation, I would say, if you want to watch a movie that features action, sort of more action than this, with an actor who keeps dying and keeps getting brought back to life, maybe the mechanism through which that happens is not the same.

But Edge of Tomorrow is a pretty good movie featuring Tom Cruise where he dies and comes back to life a whole bunch of times. And that movie's amazing, and it lives up to what this movie in some ways kind of hopes to be which is having something to say about the human condition when the human condition looks nothing like what someone like anyone of us would recognize, but something so drastically different that you have to come to terms with it while it's happening to you. And that's a lot of what this movie kind of should have leaned into, is like you both alluded to what does this actually mean for someone that this is happening to? And I like that there's vo in this movie. I like that we get voiceover throughout.

I think that saves some of the movies kind of falling even flatter for me, because we do get to see inside the mind of Mickey seventeen. But frankly they don't do enough with it. Again, there's you know, if you want to talk about movies with cloning or disposable humans, I would say look no further than two thousand and nine's Moon, which features Sam Rockwell on a space station as a lonely worker who is doesn't understand what's going on with him, and he may be a clone or a disposable human. Those movies, both of those movies, Edge Tomorrow and Moon are much better, more interesting movies, and essentially have the same conversation that this movie's attempting to have, but it almost feels I wouldn't say ADHD, but as someone who has adult ADHD, I think there's no better explanation than just it can't decide on what to focus on, and so instead of focusing on one or two things that focuses on, it splits his focus among five things, and in doing that, it doesn't do any of them very well.

And look, Robert Pattinson's not gonna be this, I don't know, profitable. He's been profitable for a very long time, so it might be bad to say like he won't be this profitable forever. But I would love to have seen a better movie with Robert Pattinson in it, because he's not gonna get his prime years every director he's working with it. I don't know if he's ever gonna work with Bung Juneo again. But this is neither one of their best efforts.

Even if it's a pretty good effort from Robert Pattinson overall, I still don't think that this is one where I'd be like, you want to hear what I think Robert Pattinson's best role is. It would this would not I don't think this would be even in the top five for me for Robert Pattinson's roles. And I I think it's trying to kind of be angled as something worth, like you said, doctor Pearl Mutter, really looking at more critically, and I think it's I think it's a good performance. I just don't think it's one of his best performances because it just a lot of his best performances actually have something to say at the end of it, like he actually gets somewhere. Like you said, Miranda, his character has an arc, and in this movie, his character has no arc.

And if you're gonna make me sit for two and a half hours in your movie, please give the character some growth by the end of it, unless that's the point. But even if they were attempting for that to be the point, they didn't earn it in this movie at all. One of the things that they muddeled was couldn't really tell if they were criticizing cruelty towards humans and dismissiveness of human life for advancement or cruelty towards animals. And I think there's evidence for both, but you should really just pick one. And the scene where they're in prison.

They look as if they're supposed to be modeled after Kennel's look as if they're they're in dog cages and they're really cramped, and it's such a small area that that just really struck me when I saw that. And then Toni Collette's treatment for of the little alien baby, for her sauces, that was just so callous, but callous in kind of a again in over the Top what you talked about her mugging doctor Palmutter, and she was, especially in those latter scenes, really over emphasizing how little she cared about anything other than her sauces and her her husband's political career. I also want to note that the characters themselves, as you said, doctor Palmuter, they they're not really consistent. I think Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette are the best examples of that, because in the beginning, it seems as if she's kind of she has the reins, she's sort of guiding him in a certain direction, and he's just kind of an accomplice.

But then at the end he becomes this bombastically evil he's basically a super villain because he wants to wipe out an entire species and she's she doesn't really have any part in it. She's just sitting back at the space station, so don't. I'm curious why they had her be so seeming manipulative and in the beginning and telling him what to say and prompting him to act in a certain way, if that was not going to matter at the end, If she I sort of thought they were going to reveal she's the true villain all along, which wouldn't have been super novel. That would have been more interesting than what we ended up with, would have been at least some semblance of some kind of fun twist. It's shockingly straightforward, I would say, is the other thing, like to your point, just now, Miranda, like the film that we're talking about, there are no twists.

There's not any grand revelation like I was expecting there to be some sort of revelation about what the creepers were in relation to everything that's going on, and there's something else more going on here. It's like no, it's just it's not even explained. It's just like in a kind of laugh out loud moment where they're like, and it turns out the aliens can bluff too, and it's like, okay, who cares good? Lord like it? It's not interesting.

And again to have aliens that are just kind of I can't help they're standing in for something, or if they're just again, this was in the book, so we have to put it in the movie and make room for it. Which look you mentioned Stephen King, Doctor Perlmutter, Stephen King, one of his most famous adaptations is nothing like the book. The Shining is nothing like the book. You don't have to make a movie and Hugh directly to the book. One of my favorite movies, Annihilation is nothing like the book whatsoever.

The book's amazing, the film's amazing. They can both exist simultaneously. It's not a mutually exclusive equation here that I can't like the book Jurassic Park and the movie at the same time, like they're both good for different reason. This I just can't imagine other than it being like, well, this was in the book, and we have to put what's in the book in the movie. No, you don't like you can just go in a different direction completely and take Robert Pattinson's character and go down an interesting lane of a certain kind of conversation you want to have about cloning or human decency or what autonomy does someone have who's looked at as lesser than a human even though they are a human only because of the splitting of the consciousness, Like you could have gone down any of these roads.

God, Minority Report does more of this, and that movie's not even about cloning. That movie's not even about disposable humans. But it gets to the idea of like what is are as humans kind of responsibility to take care of one another in the kind of grand scheme of things, and using a sci fi kind of trope to answer that question. Everything that they introduced is so much more interesting than the path that they decided to go down. It's almost like you're sitting at a D and D table with a very unprepared DM who's like, I've just had like ten ideas, no unified one.

Someone's got to throw it all on the table and if you guys fumble your way through it, it'll be fine. It's like no, I mean, yeah, I guess, and someone will probably be having a good time. But I don't represent the people that had a good time with this, because at the end of the day, like you said, Miranda Bong Juno is such a better director than this, and he's such a better writer than this. And if you're gonna adapt somebody's stuff, go wild. You have free reign unless they somehow have creative control, which for the most part, when a writer sells their script or their book to Hollywood, they often don't get to also adapt it.

They're often just cast to the wayside and someone else comes in to do it unless they can, unless they can prove that they can do it, And there are plenty of writers that can. But there are also plenty of things that are just adapted by the people directing them, or by the person directing them and the person who wrote it in something like Goodfella's case. So again there's no need to like hew close to the source material, cause I don't even think anyone's like, well, I'm going to see Mickey seventeen because I love Mickey seven. It's my favorite book. Like I don't know, I just I know what people were there for, and it was for Robert Pattinson.

It's a Bong June Hoe film, So make that movie. Don't adapt the book. Make Bong June Hoe sci fi film with Robert Pattinson in it, and have the cloning be the inciting incident and then take it in some interesting direction. Don't make a movie based on a book that clearly the ideas that they introduced in the book are Maybe they work better on the page. Maybe this is like a No Country for Old Men situation where the ending of that book works so much better in the book than it ever did in the movie.

But I can't imagine that that's the case. But it's just one of these things where I struggle with the mainstream critical response to this movie being so overwhelming, because rarely am I directly at odds with mainstream critics, but this is one of those things where I'm like, I looked at the reviews and with like people people praised Mark Ruffalo's performance, I'm like, okay, all right, well I'm at it. No. I first of all, I think we are in the right side of history here. I mean the film, the film flopped.

I mean the film made about its budget, which you know, in Hollywood you have to make like two and a half times its budgets at least, And that doesn't necessarily mean anything, but I mean, great. That's when Warner Brothers is producing your movie. Great films. There have been very high quality films that didn't find an audience. But this was meant to be a big budget science fiction film and meant to be successful.

This was not an art house movie on a budget of you know, one million or something like that. They spent seventy or eighty million. It only made. About one hundred or something like that. This is where the critical reception is problematic, maybe because the three of us are independent in the sense that like we're not beholden to some you know, vast publishing empire, or we are not invited.

I personally have never been invited to a premiere like I was not invited to the premiere of this movie. I don't know anyone in the movie. You know, Mark Ruffalo doesn't invite me over for coffee and not any more any pickleball like he does for you, Chris. Well, after hearing this episode, he definitely is not He's definitely not taking you off his list anytime soon, doctor Promnich. He's a good actor.

I just felt he was acting. And in any case, let's talk about the villain here, because again I want to make a case that like ninety percent of the people on this spaceship, on this colony ship were villains in different kinds that the lead scientist like the other seventeen scientists, except again for that young woman who showed some sympathy. But you know, having a sympathetic concentration camp doctor who still goes through with all the horrible experiments that I don't think you win extra points in front of the Nuremberg Tribunal for like, well, you know, I felt bad doing that to those people. So this villain here, first of all, just all over the place. I mean, they throw in some white supremacist lines, which I don't think has anything to do with his lust for power.

In fact, if he was lusting for power, you'd want to appeal to everybody if he wants to be king of the new planet, you know, especially when you've got a diverse crew. I didn't understand that. Going back to another franchise, The Hunger Games, which I've seen four of whatever twenty movies they've made. But there are empires which act stupidly in science fiction and fantasy, where you go like, you know that empire wouldn't last that long. You know that kingdom, that tyranny wouldn't last that long.

In real life, they're not just very clever about being rulers, and you don't understand how his character there bred fanatical loyalty in these people. You don't understand he says things, which, again, if I were his advisor, his pr advisor, I'd go, no, don't say that. You know it just it seems like it was so ridiculously broadly drawn a villain that it takes away from villainy, right, I mean, okay, let's talk about a famous movie, the Charlie Chaplin The Great Dictator, where he was playing a great dictator and through farce, he wanted to make fun of an evil person who was trying to rule the world at the time he. Was making the movie. This was wildly ineffective political satire and wildly distracting farce, so that I really just wonder did they have a conversation and say, you know, Mark, I'm going to cut out some lines of your script here.

I'm going to rewrite something here. This just isn't working. And I was thinking about the problem of movies as opposed to plays. You know, in plays, you have a situation where you write a new play and somebody wants to produce it in Lubbock to try it out. Right, and you do fifty performances in Lubbock and the audience is there and you get a sense of what, like what lines work and what don't work, and then eventually you moved to broad Way, I mean the traditional formula, and you go like, okay, well, at least we've worked out the kinks.

And that's what's supposed to happen in movies in the shooting process, especially with digital now, and in the editing process, and it just just feels like they just didn't work out any of the obvious kinks. And again, I'm not to the question you pose, I'm not even sure that they are kinks. I think that you know, if you look at what Bung Juneo said about Mark Ruffalo's character, he said it was not not based on any specific individual, but quote a mix of many different politicians and dictators that we have seen throughout history. It's going to date this film in a way that only something like this can. I did see Genghis Khan in him.

Yes, he's absolutely right, right right, his god given name is Chingis Khan. Actually, get it right, doctor Pelboter, Come on, But to your point, like it's it's very I think it's very juvenile even in this day and age, to be like it's not based on any one person. It's like, well, if you have Mark Ruffalo playing this character at this point in time, in this area of the world, localized entirely in this movie, he's gonna lean into a specific thing, because that's just that's of the time. You're dating this movie and making it something that will be if it's not successful. Now, which to your point, doctor pearl Mutter, the movie the movie barely made back its budget.

I'd like to ask, why do we keep making these really expensive, effectively art house movies and then being surprised when they flop? Like The Bride. That movie was awful, really awful. I went and saw it in theaters. I contributed to the twenty four million dollars the film made.

That film cost one hundred million dollars. I went and saw Back Rooms two weekends ago. That movie cost ten million dollars and it made like two hundred million. I don't understand why we're wasting our time anymore by backing dump trucks full of money up to people and asking them to try and do something interesting with it. When it's not the money that's the problem.

It's the creativity behind it, this whole like I'm scared of AI. AI is scaring us, and AI is gonna take our jobs. You know, AI doesn't really mean if you don't use AI, it doesn't mean you're gonna know how to write a script. Even Bong June Hoe stumbled and fumbled through this one, and I don't know if he was using AI. Let's say for the sake of argument, he didn't, which I would assume he didn't.

This movie's not great. What are we gonna chalk that up to? Whose fault is that? Okay, well, it wasn't a very good script. Okay, that has nothing to do with anything other than a not great movie.

You can't chalk this movie's failure up to anything exterior to it, or men don't like women, like with something like The Bride, where it's like it's a female freaking Stein movie, like I won't go see that, Like, oh Jesus, there's none of that even with this movie. This movie just bomb because it's not a great movie. This is not a Blade Runner situation where time will be kind to this film and ten years from now will be having a four hour documentary about Mickey seventeen. No, I think that this would be a movie that maybe fifteen years from now, there'll be someone who looks like someone like me, talking like someone like me, who's like, hey, we're talking about this Robert Pattinson film that no one watched twenty years ago.

Like, Okay, that's probably where this movie stays. Because to your point, doctor pearl Mutter, when the movie has so many ideas that it could have gone with, like hey, these people are all Nazis. No, they're all just under the Cruciatis curse. Like that's what the movie ends up going with. At the end, it's like, but there's still the good people now, Like no, no, no, we don't get to just whitewash that and ignore it.

Like that's part of this whole theme of the movie is the complete dehumanization of humanity in Mickey seventeen. I just I'm sorry, Like I'm so disappointed by this movie. I almost feel like I have to apologize for the three of us watching it. But then I remember I didn't make it, so it's technically not my fault. But I will vouch for the fact that Robert Pattinson, I think, for the most part and Bong Juneoe both have relatively successful enough track records that it's more surprising to me that this movie is not successful than the fact that it's a failure for me.

Sidi. Anyways, everything that we talked about so far, all of the problems that we've pointed out are in the plot. It's really incredible how that was really the only consistent issue with the movie. Everything else, as we discussed at the beginning, and doctor pomo To pointed out the cinematography. The music was unimpressive, but technically okay.

It certainly wasn't obtrusive. The acting was fantastic within the confines of the script as much as possible. Really, I mean, Tony Colette, she really was struggling at the end, and I don't blame her. I just I don't even think Noel Streep could make do with some of the lines that she had in that strange dream sequence. The sound production was very good.

I did notice. I don't know if this was just me, but I noticed some moments in the latter half of the movie where a character would be speaking to another character and you're seeing their reaction and the audio sounds odd, like the voice sounds slightly muffled. Did anybody else notice that? Yeah, it was not just you. I was wondering, like what, I don't know if it was like a intense choice or just a odd choice.

I would say the music in this movie similarly, was kind of an odd choice, didn't you? Miranda love K drama music in this sci fi film? There were some like K drama takeaways where I was like, what is what is happening here? Like who's designing the sound? And like the production of the audio for this film?

Like what are we doing here? This is so straight? I actually appreciated it kind of as a distraction. It's kind of oh, that's interesting, you know, and I thought less about what's happening in the scene. So valid, that's valid.

Yeah, I actually I did. I enjoyed the music, and I thought it was it was no K choice, especially if you know they were I didn't really notice any like K drama asque. It was towards the edgwar like this very like melancholy stuff towards the end where I was like, this is it's just it was weird because this is it's a Bong June whole film. But if I were to ask you Miranda, Like, if you watch this movie and I would ask you, like, who directed this film, would you say it's Is there's anything about it that's distinctly long June Ho, I don't especially. Compared especially compared to the thing that everybody remembers him for is parasite, right, And then sometimes people bring up snow Piercer with a host or mother, probably more recently oak Jah.

I don't know even if, even if you had somebody who was a mega fan of Bonng June Hoe, that they would be able to identify him as the director of this movie. It was just such a departure from everything that I've seen him do before. It's very odd. I thought it, and I'm wondering if this, if this was entirely his brainchild. And maybe that's.

Why in ways Vanity Peace type things. Yes, he you know, it's this is his prequel Star Wars prequel series. He's George Lucas and nobody can say no to him because he was successful in his previous projects. And three, it rhymes, it's like poetry at rhymes. That's what he said.

That's what George Lucas said. He said after it's like poetry at rhyme, don't throw I think that those prequel movies are better than this movie. I would say that, but the prequel movies are somehow better than this movilm definite. I'm a better score. Yeah, no kidding, Listen.

I think when you have someone like Bong Juno, who is, like you said, Miranda, known for Parasite, a film that won Oscars, and it was a foreign language film that won the Best Picture in the United States by a overwhelmingly English speaking Academy gave it the Best Picture in twenty nineteen before the world effectively continued to go further sideways than it has now. And I think Parasite in a lot of ways is worth revisiting because I think the film is even more important now than it was when it came out seven years ago, which is just the worst thing I've said all day. I can't imagine that he will be remembered for this movie as anything other than, like you said, Miranda, maybe a vanity project.

This seems a little Doctor Pearlmutter like Bonfire of the Vanities, as it were, a little I'm just gonna kind of do my own thing and just throw everything into this because Bonfire the vanity is also aanity project. Toys, Barry Levinson's Toys also a vanity project. Movies that are just kind of a mess and the meander and unwieldy, I think is a nice way of putting it. And either you vibe with them or you don't. I'm sure that there are people that watch this movie that were like, man, you just don't get it.

Man, it's so humanization. It's like, you know what, Okay, cool, I'm not gonna yuck. You're young. It ain't for me. Because I love Barry Levinson's Toys.

That movie with Robin Williams is completely out of its mind. I love that movie, but I that movie's poorly reviewed because it's not a good movie. I'm not gonna sit and say it's a good movie. I like it, but it's a vanity project. Vanity projects tend to be like this, bloated meandering with big actors who just want to work with a director.

I mean, if if someone comes to you and says, hey, I've got the Oscar winning director of Parasite here and he'd like to work with you, if you're an actor half your sult, would you say no, I don't want to work with him. No, you say, yeah, I do want to work with and that's this movie. I'm not sure the studio you're you're gonna say, Okay, let's give them eighty million. He'll do a science fiction film based on a best I assume best selling novel. You know, it really brings up this question.

I want to go back to income disparity. You brought this up, christ I guess this is an audio podcast, so people can't see me shaking Mike Caine here at the clouds in the sky. But it really bothers me. How much money is spent on movies that are making a point about income disparity which could have been made for a much lower amount of mine, and a lot of it seems wasted. I mean, how many Hollywood streaming series movies has there been this excess on the screen where hundred eighty million dollars I think was the budget for this one, but like other area of other movies, two million, two hundred and fifty million, And what do we have to show for it?

Right? Did it really show us something that was different than Cleopatra in nineteen sixty three, you know where they supposedly the most expensive movie ever made. But my gosh, you watch all three hours plus of that and you see every dollar on the screen and you go like, Okay, well they needed six thousand extras and they needed the Golden Barge because that's what they were trying to achieve. I really think Hollywood sometimes just needs to look into a mirror and say, if we are going to make points, like we should spend the appropriate amount of money to make those perfins and not the budget of a poor third world nation for healthcare on essentially a waste. And you brought up the Bride, But I think that probably we could name about fifty other movies and a lot of TV shows where yeah, you could have done that show, you just didn't need to spend one hundred million dollars to do it, plus of course to the publicity.

Now I want to go back to something just reclaiming, because we've said something really important, I think, which is that there's a line in The Sopranos where you know, the character of Chris Maltasante has this dream of being a screenwriter, right, and he goes to Hollywood and he's trying to sell this this horror film, the slasher horror film, to Ben Kingsley to be the star in it right. And Ben Kingsley hears him give this just ridiculous pitch and he says, well, in the end, it's the script right. And I thought that about summed it up. It is like you can have you can spend money in Hollywood today and you can have you can have great costume design. In fact that I'm trying to think of the last Hollywood movie I saw that had horrible costume design.

And Miranda's right, there were some audio issues in this film, but generally you can find really good people to do your audio. You can find really good people to do the stunts, you know, the dog wrangling, what I mean you do. There's a scene with raccoons in the movie. You can find in Hollywood to rent raccoons. You know, We've watched some TV series movies with great raccoons.

But man, no matter what, you can spend a billion dollars and just not have a good screenplay. It's the one thing. And I actually feel good about that because I do not think that Ai is going to write an excellent screenplay where people are blown away. And the winner for Best Screenplay twenty twenty nine is Grock. Oh God, it ain't gonna be Grock unless you're winning an award maybe at the KKKKLAN Awards.

Because I mean that, I mean that, but I mean like, That's the problem with something like AI is the human input and the human output is not ever going to be any better than what the human can put in. If you can't write a good script, AI is not gonna magically make one for you. AI is not gonna punch up your script that you failed to write well, because it can only do as well as what you've given it. And if you stink it writing, you stink it writing. And that's like you said, doctor Perlmutter, there's no way around that.

There's no magical button you can press, like in this movie to make something happen, to become a good writer. And what's crazy is they don't pay the writers enough. They pay everybody else a lot of money, and the writers have to go on strike to get any sort of representation in any capacity. As someone who is friends with several writers, including Richard HadAM who's been on this show countless times, they don't get paid enough, and yet without them there's literally nothing, and they would have to go get AI to write the scripts. That's the problem.

The people that are worried about the AI stealing their scripts should be the ones going bring it on. AI can't do that. The people that should be worried about AI doing the scripts of the people who can't do the scripts without the writer. Everybody else should be worried because there's no amount of good writing that can be replaced by AI. But boy, bad writing and AI are synonymous.

And guess what, you don't have to use AI to write poorly. Case in point, this film, case in point The Bride, case in point frankly the Mandalorian and Grogu, a film that, like you said, Doctor Perlmutter, costs like one hundred and sixty million dollars and lost to two Bozo gen Z horror movies that have more to say with like one sixteenth of the budget, and I say boso horror movies because neither one of them ten years ago would have ever gotten made if not for the fact that the mainstream is now finally looking at places where democratization of videos have existed, like YouTube and saying, oh, you mean ten million people on YouTube might actually show up in person to watch the movie based on the thing from YouTube.

Uh yeah, uh yeah they did. But guess what if people weren't showing up to watch Mandalorian and Grogu on Disney Plus, guess what they're not gonna do. Go see it in the theater, no matter how much money you throw at it, no matter how many times Pedro Pascal goes and eats wings on Hot One, I don't care. You can't create interest in something that people have deemed one interesting because the right isn't living up to the expectation. And this movie, I think, like you said, doctor Perlmutter, it's mighty wide of you movie to say, Hey, by the way, income inequality, let's spend one hundred million dollars on this goofy movie.

Like, come on, guys, we're really missing the point here by a mile. But hey, you know what, to be fair, don't cry too hard for the studios. Most of these movies that bomb, they're just a rounding error at the end of the day. Anyways. So AI is good for adding two and two together really quickly, because two plus two is always four.

But if you need someone to make a decision about a script that's a creative idea, AI can't do that, And I'm confident in that when people are worried about AI taking their jobs, the people that should be worried about AI taking their jobs are the people who do jobs that AI could do for them in two seconds, because that's what AI is good for, is manually optimizing things that have been done manually before, not making creative decisions. Because if you're outsourcing AI to make creative decisions for you, Dear God, I pray for you, because if you get caught doing it, like the Duffer Brothers did with Stranger Things, they'll roast you over a fire until there's nothing left, even if you didn't use it and it was just open on your screen and somebody caught it in the documentary that they released.

Bad screenwriting doesn't the author of bad screenwriting AI or not is always bad. And that's yeah, Like you said, doctor Promutter, it's such a shame because I really I had high hopes for this movie, higher hopes than I normally have for a lot of things I sit down to watch, and by the end of it, I was excited to rewatch other Robert Pattinson things that he's much better in, like the drama which came out this year, and I think costs like five dollars to make. I don't even know. They probably paid Zendaiya and Robert Pattinson sag minimum and that was about it. But it's a much more engaging and interesting film and a much more human story that speaks to the times now than a movie where they spent a billion dollars on it and missed the point by not only a mile, but like four or five mile.

I think it's really interesting how that's also true, this idea that you can spend a bunch of money on something and have it just be absolute garbage because you are either not talented or because you are misinformed and you're not having people, the people around you correct decisions you're making. And obviously streaming platforms like Netflix are really guilty of doing this, just churning out as much as possible so that they have content on the platform, and a lot of it's really cookie cutter and not really interesting. And there's definitely it's true in every form of art, in every creative endeavor, in architecture, in music, in movie making, that if you can't make something great with a limited budget and limited resources, then if you can only if you can only make great art with unlimited resources, with a large amount of money, a large amount of power and control.

But you can't make it make the same quality media or art or whatever with limited resources. I don't think you're a good artist because you. And I agree. I was going to say, like I have, and I think it's something that we should normalize. If people are going to have the conversation about AI and you're gonna have the idea that like AI is gonna take everybody's creative job and it's gonna run rampant, let's have the conversation about people being bad at creative things on their own, and let's just have that conversation out in the open, because I hate to break this to some creative types, but you can, like Miranda just said, suck at what you're doing, and I don't have to applaud you just because you made something.

Because especially in this day and age, where we're spending money on things to buy them or enjoy them, or you're spending time, which is more important than money on things, we shouldn't just be okay with mediocrity. We shouldn't be okay with the second screen experience. Everybody that is such a lazy existence that we have found ourselves in. I always say it's that this is we I would wish for a dystopia like Mickey seventeen because the one that we're in now is so unbelievably boring. All the contents the same, All the stuff on Netflix is the same, and all of the movies are terrible for the most part, other than like a handful of things, because they're all overproduced, over overly expensive, kind of unnecessary for the most part.

And the things that are good the drama I looked at. The budget is twenty eight million dollars and I guarantee you a lot of that it's probably just to pay Robert Pattinson and zendayas like you know, cost as actors. And that movie is written and directed by the same person just like this movie is, and it's so much more successful at telling an interesting human story with Robert Pattinson, and it's a third of the budget in this movie, and it's a movie that I think actually has some staying power and has something to say. This movie has none of that. And it's such a shame because you can't blame AI for this.

You can't blame Ai for this being a bad movie all you have to do. And that's the thing, Like, I don't know how this conversation progresses anymore in the AI is going to take the creative jobs away sphere when a bad movie has existed long before AI ever came into the picture, Doctor Peerlmutter, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, Miranda. This this may not be something you're familiar with, but the term Alan Smithy has been around for a long time so that people could, if they felt like they were no longer in control of the project, back away from it and attribute it to someone else, a fake human being in Hollywood who does not exist, but has movies attributed to him, because people like David Fincher with Alien three said, you know what, I can't, in good conscience put my name on this thing, So I'm going to take a step back.

Alan Smithy directed it. That's that's not AI that created that. That's been around since time immemoriam, since one person said I don't like what you're doing. I think what I'm doing is better. That has been a thing that could happen that has nothing to do with AI.

And this movie, like for me, is just another example, like you said, doctor promoter, of spending a lot of money on something that doesn't yield anything other than what's an inequality movie. But you spent a lot of money on it and it made no money. Okay, I just it's weird in this day and age to have that. And this movie came out in twenty twenty five. This isn't like, well, this movie came out in twenty nineteen before all the wild stuff'sm happening.

He's like, no, this movie came out like last year. Sure, it was probab in, it was in the incubator during the pandemic. I'm sure. But what an out of touch message for this movie to have on top of everything else. I mean, look, a lot of things feel out of touch now, and to speak about it circularly without speaking on it specifically, I will say, as my personal final point on this movie, I don't go to movies to be reminded about how terrible things are out in the real world.

I actually go to movies to escape and enjoy myself for an hour and a half to two and a half hours. I don't go see movies to be reminded that oh out in the real world. Things are not great, and people are doing things that they shouldn't be doing under the auspices of things that we have become accustomed to, to the point where you can put it in a movie now and everybody goes, oh, that's that thing. It's like, man, why is that a thing that we all have to share now? Like?

Why is that a shared trauma in media that people can exploit? I don't know, but there's gonna be a lot of media from about let's call it twenty years right now that's all gonna have similar themes to it. And I'm not saying I'm not down with those themes. It's just if you're going to do it, it's got to be a lot more nuanced than this, because this is about as Nuances being clocked over the head by Gallagher's sledgehammer really really hard. Well, I guess my final point would be that I don't regret seeing this movie.

I wouldn't recommend it to anybody ever again, and I would never watch it again. But it's just such a perfect representation of many many issues that we have with specifically modern Hollywood, that I feel it can be a good reference point whenever I bring up these issues in the future, just in conversation. It's just it does a really good job of exemplifying so much that disgusts me about contemporary movies. Yeah, I like to think of myself as a historian, and I do urge people to look back at the history of when we've had actual situations on planet Earth. And this was true in Nazi Germany, this was true in Imperial Japan.

I said, Unit seven eight one, But this is actually that seven to three to one. A lot of people know about that, don't know about that, but they were a unit of the Japanese army that experimented on people with diseases. In fact, a couple of the scenes of Robert Pattison here just seemed to me direct references to that, And I feel you really need to respect that kind of history. It can't be just be tossed into a farce and be part of a plot without some historical grounding. And I think that's the lesson too, is that when you're going if that quote you had from him, the director there is if I were having a conversation with him, and I actually I see a text message from him right now, I've got to go and discuss the film my notes, But it really is important to respect the history that you're referencing when you're making a movie and to sort of understand its context and just the way the plot went in this I would have respected it, and I would have seen the historical illusions as manifest to some really deep important point if it had been better thought through.

And I guess that's my coda for a lot of Hollywood movies is they just don't feel like somebody ork your committee of somebodies, because that a lot of you know, for fifty years in Hollywood, movies were made by committee. A committee of people sat through it and at least thought through everything. So I'm not telling anybody not to watch this movie. There are a lot of. Entertaining and interesting maybe in the theater there were more of those, but ultimately didn't work.

No, Yeah, I'm with y'all. It did not work. And I look forward to the next time the three of us get to talk about something good because I think Trained to Boossan for me, for even the failures that that movie had, the successes are so much stronger than even like the minor success that this movie may have. That movie set such a higher water mark. And I mean even again Bung Junhoe's other work.

So I think to your point, your points, I would not suggest this to anyone, even someone who's a Robert Pattinson fan, I would not suggest it to them. But what a bummer. So if you want to hear the three of us talking about something that's not this to allude back to Train to Booston, you can find that episode on the RSS feed for this for this show, which is over at weirdingwaymedia dot com, where this show and all the other shows I work on can be found, other than the one that I do on Patreon, which is a James Bond show that's ending soon because well we've run out of James Bond movies and they're not making anymore because now blofeld owns James Bond in real life, so that's fun. So yeah, so we're covering James Bond and by the end of July we'll be done with James Bond, moving on to something else that we will be talking about later in the fall, but it will be on its own RSS feed.

But if you want to kick a couple dollars my way, Patreon is still the place to do it, and if you do it later in the year, you'll get access to that new show a month early and ad free, because hey, got to make money somehow, and if I'm not making money on the ads, I'm making mone money on you listening to the show. Thank you both so much for joining me. It was fun. I feel like this was a test. Maybe we'll see if you guys both come back, because this was not only a long movie, but it was a long kind of not great movie.

So those are the best kind of movies, the long ones that aren't great. Yeah, and as always, we'll catch you on the next episode.