‘Mickey 17’ is a mean-spirited adaptation

Hey there. Welcome to the Friday edition of Popculturology. You might notice some changes around here today (especially if you’re on the website). I’m excited to announce the launch of The Omnicosm.

Don’t worry, though — Popculturology isn’t going anywhere.

Ever since I launched Snackology last year, I wanted to find a way to more clearly define its relationship with Popculturology. Did it fall under Popculturology? Did having a newsletter about snack food dilute Popculturology’s mission?

In the end, I realized that Popculturology and Snackology were siblings — which meant they needed a parent. That parent is The Omnicosm.

Besides some visual cues, nothing is changing with the newsletters. (Snackology did get a snazzy logo refresh to establish that it stands on its own next to Popculturology.) The creation of The Omnicosm not only gives me the space to craft unique identities for these two newsletters, it opens the door for new additions in the future.

As always, thanks for reading. Let’s jump into my thoughts on Mickey 17, Daredevil: Born Again and a bunch of pop culture news ...

Bong Joon-ho turns a great book into something small

The transformation of a book into a movie is always going to come with some big changes. Denis Villeneuve has repeatedly done this, expanding the scope of The Story of Your Life into Arrival before modernizing elements of Dune into his film duology. (And I fully expect him to make some major tweaks to Rendezvous with Rama in order to bring that story to modern audiences.)

I’m baffled, though, at the wholesale changes that Bong Joon-ho made as he adapted the novel Mickey7 into the film Mickey 17.

I caught the film on Thursday night, and I was left annoyed, disappointed and even a bit angry at how the writer/director brought Edward Ashton’s book to life.

While I’m new to the Mickey7 fan club, the fact that I just read the book last month means that it’s fresh in my mind. I’m not comparing the film to some cherished memory from my youth. And while I could see Bong having to overhaul a novel that was a relic of its time, Mickey7 was published in 2022. This wasn’t some problematic story from decades ago that wouldn’t work today.

I was immediately struck by how mean-spirited Mickey 17 is. When reading Mickey7, I kept thinking how Mickey Barnes reminded me of a simpler Mark Watney, the protagonist in Andy Weir’s The Martian. Sure, Mickey is nowhere as smart as Mark, but his chatty narration gave Mickey7 warmth and wittiness.

The film Mickey 17 is missing those elements.

Robert Pattinson delivers a great performance as both Mickey 17 and Mickey 18, but the characters themselves fail to capture the rapport of their counterparts in the book. The film’s two Mickeys are almost always at odds, with Mickey 18 repeatedly turning to violence — a strange choice when in the book, despite an initial confrontation, Seven and Eight are a team, and there’s the vibe of a buddy comedy.

I’m not sure why Bong chose this book to tell the story he tried to tell in Mickey 17. In the book, no one is a caricature. No one is a cartoon. But the film turns Marshall, the antagonist, into buffoon (who Bong swears isn’t just a Donald Trump ripoff) played by Mark Ruffalo. On top of that odd decision is the even more bizarre choice to give Marshall a wife who is obsessed with sauce. Like, sauces that you eat.

In addition to being meaner, Mickey 17 thinks smaller than its source material. Ashton dreamed up a future where humans had spread to new planets, the Diaspora. He told the story of a man (who may or may not have similarities to Elon Musk) who abused human cloning to the point where the other colonized planets were faced with the threat of a single planet populated solely by clones of this one man. Mickey 17 trades that for a weasley looking guy who makes a few clones of himself in order to get away with killing homeless people.

For a book about human clones being repeatedly killed, Mickey7 is actually often quiet and spiritual (there’s even a repeated dream featuring a large caterpillar and backward-burning campfire), reflecting on what makes one human. The film adaptation trades those qualities for an attempt at spectacle and shock but winds up coming empty.

“It’s hard to come to terms with a violent nature”

Daredevil is back. After teasing the characters from the Netflix series in various MCU projects — you may remember seeing Matt Murdock in Spider-Man: No Way Home and She-Hulk and Wilson Fisk in Hawkeye and Echo — Marvel Studios has fully established these characters in our familiar cinematic universe with Daredevil: Born Again.

(Let’s not get into whether or not the Marvel shows on Netflix were in the MCU. Sure, people said they were, but were they?)

As someone who never watched the various final season of the Netflix shows (joke’s on you for watching Iron Fist), I came into Daredevil: Born Again with a bit of

I never finished the Netflix shows, I jumped into this series with a bit of confusion. In several spots, I had to ask, is the show referring to something from the Netflix shows? Or is it just taking creative license with the time jump? For a sprawling cinematic universe, it’s easy to dismiss questions like those. I’m sure a day will come when some MCU projects loops back on Secret Invasion, and I’ll have no idea what’s going on.

With the first two episodes of Born Again dropping this past week, we got a good amount of storytelling. Matt Murdock has quit being Daredevil after the death of his friend, Foggy. (RIP, The Mighty Ducks’ Fulton Reed.) Wilson Fisk is now mayor of New York City. And the cops have arrested the guy who prowls the streets as the vigilante White Tiger.

I’d love to see more of Daredevil in action. People raved about the Netflix series because it was violent and visceral. We got a bit of that at the beginning of Born Again’s first episode and a tease of more to come at the end of the second episode. I’m sure there’s more to come.

What I’m not sure about, though, is how the show is filling in the spaces between those moments of violence. People wanted to see Charlie Cox, Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson reunited — and they got that for a few minutes in the first episode before Henson’s Foggy was gunned down. Because of that death, Born Again is missing the dynamic between those three characters. And while I’m intrigued by Michael Gandolfini’s sniveling Daniel, none of these new characters are filling that gap.

Maybe Marvel believes that Daredevil: Born Again can coast by on the goodwill earned by the Netflix series. I dunno if that’ll work for another seven episodes.

• That’s how you end an episode: I loved that the first episode ended with “Staring at the Sun” by TV on the Radio. Instant flashback to the Breaking Bad episode “Over” ending with the group’s “DLZ.”
• What’s old is new ... or is it still old? Daredevil: Born Again underwent an almost complete creative revamp at one point, coming after Marvel Studios had partially reintroduced the characters in shows like She-Hulk and Hawkeye. Over at Pajiba, Tori Preston tries to map out how versions of Matt Murdock and Kingpin changed from Netflix to the MCU and then maybe back to their Netflix versions? (Pajiba)
• Break out the Scooby Snacks: The first season of Daredevil: Born Again premiered this week, but Marvel is already hard at work on the second season, with Matthew Lillard signing on for an unknown role. (Deadline)

Lorne from New York ...

I finished reading Lorne, the wisely named Lorne Michaels biography from Susan Morrison, this week. If you’re an SNL fan and you’ve followed any of the behind-the-scenes tales from the show (or spiritual spinoffs like The Tonight Show and Late Night) over the past half century, this book pretty cleanly turns that history into a straightforward narrative told through Michaels’ life. Good luck not reading quotes from Michaels in a Lorne Michaels voice, though ...

NEWS, NOTES & TRAILERS

“They should do everything possible to get Chris Nolan”

The pop culture world is still attempting to come to terms with the Broccoli family relinquishing its generational hold on the James Bond franchise. (Daring Fireball’s John Gruber made an appearance on The Vergecast earlier this week to discuss Amazon taking the reins.) What does the House that Jeff Bezos built have planned for 007?

Over at TheWrap, Umberto Gonzalez and Drew Taylor offer one very simple solution to get the franchise back on track: Bring in Christopher Nolan.