Can you think of all the extra work you could get done in a day if there were two of you? How about if there were three or four of you? It’s safe to say that if there could be more than one of you to do the odd task, you could start to consider that some of those extra versions of yourself may be redundant, expendable.
That’s exactly what Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is, an easily replaceable worker. Needing to flee from loan sharks on Earth with his colleague Timo (Steven Yeun), Mickey signs up for a less than favourable position. On the deep space multi-year expedition to the human colony of Nilfheim, Mickey is going to die, a lot! As an ‘Expendable’, he can die time and time again, get cloned within 24 hours and is ready to be shipped out on another suicide mission.
With his only real companion being his girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) after multiple deaths, Mickey is now known as “Mickey 17“, just more meat for the meat grinder. But when he’s left for dead (again) only to unexpectedly survive, Mickey 17 finds himself face to face with… Mickey 18! As “multiples” are arbitrarily deemed too dangerous to survive, the pair must attempt to fly under the radar. Together, they will come up against the egomaniacal politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Yifa (Toni Collette). Both of whom are governing the Nilfheim colony with evil plans of their own.
Mickey 17 is writer and director Bong Joon-ho‘s long awaited follow up to his 4 time Oscar winning Korean film Parasite (2019). Mickey 17 adapts Edward Ashton‘s 2022 novel, Mickey7. The film was developed in tandem with the writing of the book and ended up going in vastly different directions. While Mickey 17 shares with Parasite a focus on the class struggle between workers and their “betters”. But Mickey 17 leans much more heavily into an absurd side of black comedy than the director’s previous works.
I’ve been a huge fan of Bong Joon-ho for a while. I appreciate any filmmaker who can work as successfully with varied genres. Horror, thriller, comedy, sometimes all within, his 2003 true crime film Memories of Murder being my personal favourite. It’s why I find Mickey 17 to be somewhat disappointing, moving so far into satirical elements, Bong Joon-ho saps away any potential drama from the story and characters.
Mickey 17 has lofty themes of class divides, colonialism, the philosophical and moral ambiguity of “printing” human beings again and again. All of which clash together, sometimes finding an interesting take or new perspective to the idea before being turned into a joke and promptly moved on from. Nothing feels truly real or has much of a lasting impact beyond some chuckles, as conceptually, the film is all over the place.
We dive into the world through Mickey‘s characteristically dim-witted perspective and at first, it is fitting that this world we’re in makes so little sense. But then, possibly as a result of rewrites, to clarify the details the script utilises ample flashbacks and voiceover delivered by a Mickey who now knows all. This in attempt to explain a technology or give world building retroactively, rather than allowing us to just be swallowed up naturally into Mickey’s twisted universe.
It is a shame, as Bong Joon-ho‘s previous English language, star studded, and dystopian sci-fi epic, Snowpiercer (2013) looks incredible. Oscar nominated cinematographer and production designers Darius Khondji and Fiona Crombie here create a brutal, industrial backdrop. One which suits this new story of a loss of humanity and venturing to the stars, although not for any love of exploration, but simply utility and profit.
The characters of Mickey 17 mostly range from underdeveloped to absent in their entirety. With many supposed principals vanishing from the movie or just being introduced out of nowhere as needed. Female characters suffer the most from this with Anamaria Vartolomei‘s Kai Katz existing for no other reason than to lose her lesbian partner, inexplicably throw herself at Mickey, then almost disappear for the rest of the film. Potentially another sign of a troubled production.
However, Naomi Ackie as Nasha fairs a little better, with the fiery woman being a leader in the making. Nasha stands up against all, when she isn’t taking ownership of Mickey. Their love story falls among the film’s superfluous subplots, although it is good for a few laughs, it does no favours otherwise.
If there’s characters who receive too much screen time on the other hand, it would be the decreasingly funny political caricatures played by Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette. A veneered toothed charlatan and his sauce obsessed wife (I have no idea…), the two are thinly written takes on what everyone currently hates about right-wing politicians. Religious fundamentalism, egoism, cowardice, duplicity, and racism is all presented in a surface level fashion. As obvious as the red baseball caps on their supporter’s heads, it’s just a series of adjectives which never threaten to shape into anything resembling an actual personality.
We know that Toni Collette is capable of much more than this, but short of whispering in her husband’s ear, she isn’t really given anything to work with. While Ruffalo played the despicable antagonist libertine wonderfully in 2023’s Poor Things, it’s impressive just how much less interesting and more annoying he is in Mickey 17.
Mickey 17’s standout performance(s) would be Robert Pattinson. Although, even then, for how many times Mickey is cloned, the film seems to struggle to find uses for him. Bong Joon-ho chose to increase Mickey‘s number from the novel from 7 to 17 to kill him more times, but there’s little inspiration to the ‘Groundhog Day’ conundrum, and most of his repetitive deaths come through an early montage.
We mostly get to see Pattinson in a dual performance as the mild mannered and spineless Mickey 17 against the forceful and hot-tempered Mickey 18. The times I found myself laughing the most throughout the film were in fact while watching Pattinson play off himself. You can’t have too much Robert Pattinson!
We live in a world which already feels like a parody of itself and while this would be fertile ground for Bong Joon-ho‘s latest, at its best the Mickey 17 is kind of funny and at its worst pretentious and dull. A masterpiece like Parasite was always going to be a tough act to follow for Bong Joon-ho, but Mickey 17 struggles to independently find its own footing. Worth a watch for many, especially for fans of the celebrated Korean director’s rich filmography, but not a highlight by any means.
Mickey 17 is a big budget and toothless satire with little more to say than “cartoonish evil people are evil” and “wouldn’t it suck to die over a dozen times”.