Cinema is a medium of imagination, and science-fiction is a genre of possibility. So it’s understandable that movies about the future tend to be, if not optimistic, at least aspirational—conjuring a realm of flying cars and exotic planets and soulful cyborgs. Mickey 17, the latest whatsit from Bong Joon-ho, tacks in the opposite direction. It asks, with a mixture of whimsy and sincerity: What if the future sucks?
To be fair, this line of prospective apprehension has its own gloomy descendants. (Just last year, Alien: Romulus continued that franchise’s preoccupation with capitalistic drudgery, conceiving of a mining colony where indentured servants labored in permanent darkness.) But Bong’s vision here is distinctive for how it depicts galactic exploration as an error-riddled process that’s permanently, perpetually janky. Hardly anything works smoothly in Mickey 17; its characters are constantly beset by glitchy conveyor belts and ineffectual antidotes and crappy cooking, not to mention the usual human malice and venality. It feels a lot like the world of today, only with more spaceships and aliens.
This description might make the movie sound depressing. But while Mickey 17 is undeniably (and perhaps obtusely) a political allegory, impugning the ineptitude of the ruling class, it is first and foremost a comedy. And while it gestures toward serious philosophical matters—the ethics of human cloning, the encroachment of climate change, the reign of self-obsessed technocrats—it swats away any concerns of pretension, instead adopting a tone that is playful, humble, and even sweet.
At least two of those qualities apply to its titular hero, played with daffy tenderness by Robert Pattinson. Mickey used to have a proper surname, Barnes, but after finding himself indebted to a vicious loan shark, he fled his homeland to crew on a spaceship bound for Niflheim, an icy, inhospitable planet that inevitably recalls Star Wars’ Hoth. Specifically, he volunteered to be an “expendable”—a sort of multipurpose troubleshooter whose brain and body can be replicated, meaning he’s routinely assigned to perform deadly tasks in the name of scientific advancement. (The technology that enables such duplication is surely revolutionary, but it isn’t exactly elegant; Mickey’s memories are stored in an ugly-looking brown brick, while the machine that spits out his newest form tends to jam and sputter.) The numeral beside his name signals the latest variation, informing us that 16 previous Mickeys have already met their unceremonious demise.
The specter of omnipresent, continuous death would seem to engender bitterness and cynicism. Mickey, however, shoulders his fatalistic reality with weary acceptance. When we first meet him, he’s crumpled at the bottom of a snowy cavern; far above him, a confederate named Timo (Steven Yeun) expresses his surprise that Mickey is still alive following a precipitous fall. Rather than offer to rescue his comrade, Timo helps himself to Mickey’s abandoned flamethrower before offering a half-hearted explanation for his lack of effort: “They’re gonna reprint you tomorrow anyway.” Mickey signals his understanding, revealing either an extraordinarily sanguine disposition or a battered soul that’s long accustomed to giving up.
As the basement-dweller of an obvious caste system, Mickey in some ways evokes the poor family in Bong’s prior film, the exhilarating Parasite. But where those characters were enterprising and conniving, Mickey is diffident and passive. To be fair, his existence isn’t completely miserable. He receives passable accommodations, and at least one of his treating physicians regards him with respect. (Not all of them, though; during one of his rebirths, his naked body tumbles to the floor because the overseeing technician is preoccupied with a videogame.) More importantly, he has a girlfriend—a vivacious woman named Nasha (Naomi Ackie, flashing more dynamism here than she did in Blink Twice), who senses his underlying decency, and with whom he has repeated, enthusiastic sex during an early montage detailing the ship’s interstellar journey.
Such copulation is forbidden, on account of its caloric expenditure, by Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), the mission’s leader and signature incompetent. He’s a real piece of work. As played by Ruffalo, who retains the haughty pomp of his Poor Things boob but replaces his superficial intelligence with fumbling stupidity, Marshall is a vaguely charismatic demagogue, one whose populist rhetoric has earned him a legion of supporters who proudly emblazon his banal slogan (“One and Only”) on hats and shirts. He is surrounded not just by an attractive wife (Toni Collette), whose primary concern appears to be the invention of gelatinous sauces, but also an array of lickspittles who ceaselessly flatter his intellect and compete for his favor; these include a bumbling doctor (Cameron Britton) whose treatments are always in the beta stage, and a Svengali (Daniel Henshall) who leverages Marshall’s lust to appear in front of cameras and to dominate the historical record. In short, Marshall is a powerful politician who is loud, obnoxious, and dumb. Sound familiar?
Mickey 17 is based on a 2022 novel by Edward Ashton, which I’ve not read, so I can’t say how freely Bong has interpreted it. But his and Ruffalo’s joint decision to portray its villain as a Trumpian analogue strikes me as a little easy, rooting the picture to this specific era rather than allowing its themes to unfurl into the metaphorical vastness of space.
Not that the movie is lacking in material or ideas. If anything (and in contrast to the sharply coiled Parasite), it’s somewhat overstuffed. In genre terms, Mickey 17 is many things—an underworld yarn, a love story, a science-fiction parable, a buddy comedy—and Bong struggles to reconcile all of its bustling, bursting impulses. The subplot regarding the loan shark, in particular, is clumsily handled, portending a payoff that never arrives. (It also largely wastes Yeun, a talented actor who here isn’t given much to do.) And while Bong remains a canny showman, his climax—a frenetic battle sequence involving an extraterrestrial species that look like giant walruses crossed with roly-polies—doesn’t achieve the kinetic majesty of the best action cinema.
Yet the movie’s muchness is also an asset, allowing Bong to showcase his dexterity and versatility. Happily pinballing between tones, timelines, and locations, he invests the picture with a raucous momentum that’s enveloping, even if individual characters are given short shrift. (As one of Marshall’s security guards, Happening’s Anamaria Vartolomei is charming—especially during a farcical sequence where she and Mickey dine in Marshall’s chambers, with painful gastrointestinal results—but she mostly operates in the background.) Bong also elicits a wonderful performance from Pattinson, who stealthily turns Mickey’s resigned geniality into the film’s strongest gravitational force.
Numerous times in Mickey 17, other people ask its taken-for-granted hero what it feels like to die, but the real problem for Mickey is that he lives. Namely, following that aforementioned tumble through the ice, his superiors assume he’s dead and thus dutifully crank out the latest model, Mickey 18—not realizing that our trusty #17 has in fact survived. This presents significant problems for our pal Mickey—not just because strict regulations forbid the existence of “multiples” (Bong inserts an explanatory interlude about a serial killer who used his various incarnations to stymie law enforcement), but also because 18 turns out to be less a straightforward duplicate than a professional and romantic rival.
Twin cinema is a rife subgenre, but Pattison’s performance(s) here are hardly typical. Speaking in a pinched, nasal whine, he effortlessly differentiates his doppelgangers; where 17 is mild, modest, and affable, 18 is angry, cocky, and assertive. Yet Pattinson also suggests their shared DNA, creating a curiously symbiotic relationship that proves both oppositional and fraternal. The scenes in which the two variants navigate their predicament and underline their clashing personalities (18 is repeatedly infuriated by 17’s timidity) lend the movie its bountiful wellspring of comedy, along with its quiet source of pathos.
And for all of Mickey 17’s shortcomings, there is something strangely moving about its heedlessness—its commitment to telling such a sprawling, unruly story in such a rambunctious, freewheeling way. It’s far from perfect; it’s also decidedly memorable. It may just be another movie about a clone. But when it comes to reinvigorating big-budget, big-brained cinema, Bong’s bold ambition—and Pattinson’s oddball charisma—are irreplaceable.
Grade: B
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.