Mickey 17
Written and directed by Bong Joon Ho
Starring Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo
Rated R
Runtime: 2 hours and 17 minutes
In theaters March 7

by Tessa Swehla, Associate Editor

The idea of disposable people isn’t new to science fiction, but Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 takes the concept in a new direction. Based on the 2022 novel Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton (which I haven’t read but presume has less Mickeys), the film interrogates the willingness of society to accept that some people are worth less than others, sacrificing them on the altar of progress. Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is one such person: in order to escape a dangerous and an increasingly deteriorated Earth, he agrees to serve as an Expendable on a colony spaceship traveling to the distant planet Niflheim. As an Expendable, he is subjected to all sorts of perilous missions and painful and often lethal science experiments, all possible because if he dies, the science team can just make him a new body through 3D printing, a practice banned on Earth for obvious ethical reasons. 

By the time they arrive at Niflheim (and use four or five Mickeys to develop and test a vaccine against a native virus), Mickey is on his 17th iteration, which doesn’t seem to matter to his girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a security guard/firefighter/soldier. On an away mission, Mickey 17 falls into a ravine and is left for dead by his friend Timo (Steven Yuen). He is rescued by members of the indigenous life forms on the planet and returns to the ship, only to discover that, due to Temo’s report of his death, another Mickey has been printed, Mickey 18 (Robert Pattinson). Multiple bodies—or just “multiples”—are forbidden under the already strict laws, and discovery of their existence will most likely lead to both their deaths and the erasure of Mickey’s DNA and personality download from the system altogether. Both Mickeys must come to terms with what it means to be multiples while also contending with the megalomaniacal leader of the expedition, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), his scheming wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), and their plans to eliminate the indigenous life forms on the planet.

Pattinson’s performances as Mickey 17 and 18—technically all the Mickeys, but these are the two that we spend the most time with—are certainly two of the best of his career. Mickey is a rather dim but kind-hearted person, something Pattinson personifies with a truly deranged Stanley Kowalski-esque style voice. Mickey is the kind of character that is primed for exploitation even before he becomes an Expendable. He’s poor, easily manipulated, and desperate: if he stays on Earth, he will be killed by a mobster for debts that his supposedly best childhood friend Timo put under his name. He has no technical or physical skills, so the only commodity he has is his body. 

He’s also a funny character—Pattinson’s grasp of physical comedy is Chaplinesque in its slapstick—which provokes a sense of condescension in many of his fellow travelers. If he signed up for this, they reason, then why protest the often extreme violence enacted on him in the name of his job? Although Mickey is obviously the most disposable and exploited character in the film, these themes echo through the other characters and the relationships between their bodies and labor. Nasha, for an example, is selling the strength of her body and her combat skills in exchange for room and board and passage on the ship; Temo sells his skills as a pilot for the same. The Marshalls even see sex and childbirth as labor, emphasizing to at least one passenger, Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei), her importance as a breeder for the expansion of the colony. Everyone in this film is trading on their bodies one way or another, even if they aren’t being used as an inexhaustible source of guinea pigs.

The arrival of Mickey 18 is a threat to this status quo. While Mickeys 1-17 are essentially copies of the same person—the science team downloads his personality, updated every week, into every new clone—18 is noticeably different: smarter, self-aware, and violent. The characters never discover why this variance occurred, but the viewer is shown through a quick visual of the technician monitoring Mickey 18’s printing tripping over one of the leads from the hard drive to Mickey’s body, briefly disconnecting and then reattaching it. Mickey 18 despises Mickey 17 at first, seeing him as weak and gullible, and he implies that Mickey 17 is to blame for the ways in which they are exploited, even attempting to murder Mickey 17 at first in the interests of self-preservation. Many scenes in this film involve just the two Mickeys, and Pattinson excels at making the viewer forget that these two characters are played by the same person while still somehow convincingly displaying how they are related.

Unfortunately, Pattinson’s performances—as well as Naomi Ackie’s and Steven Yeun’s—and the truly funny dark humor of the film are somewhat overshadowed by script problems, particularly involving Ruffalo’s character and the ending. Ruffalo’s Marshall is a Trump caricature: the disjointed speechmaking, the puffy prosthetics, the oafish behavior are all immediately recognizable, as is his silly reality show style propaganda which is broadcast all over the ship. While taking aim at specific political and social leaders through satire is a time honored film tradition, the depiction has to be carefully deployed. A good example of this is Edward Norton’s thinly veiled Elon Musk parody Miles Bron in Rian Johnson’s 2022 film The Glass Onion. Bron is the crux of the story, the person who initiates the action of the mystery, but the film does not sacrifice other characters’ development or the plot in favor of pure satire. Instead, Bron feels like part of the fabric of the film.

Ruffalo’s Marshall, in contrast, feels like a discordant note. It’s a good performance, but it sucks up all of the oxygen in the film, especially in the last act, leaving little for the other characters. Bong seems to be relishing the opportunity to send up Trump, and this leads to more screen time for these characters than is necessary for the point to be made. Collette’s Ylfa is slightly better, perhaps because there is no direct analog for her character in the real world—she’s a clear Evangelical Christian pastor’s wife parody—leaving her more room to experiment with some really strange character choices like an obsession with sauces. The film increasingly wants to engage with this mockery, leaving the more interesting questions about humanity, identity, and exploitation on the cutting room floor. If these characters had been confined to a few key scenes—a standout being when they invite Mickey 17 to dinner and try to talk to him about white supremacy while he aggressively wolfs down a very rare steak—then they could have served as zesty seasoning for the film instead of an overpowering main ingredient.

Mickey 17 is a fun black comedy of a science fiction film, but the focus on the Marshalls as Trump surrogates is a distraction at best and a hindrance at worst.

Spoilers

I usually refrain from discussing spoilers in my reviews, but because so much of my objection to Mickey 17 occurs in the last act, it feels impossible to give a full analysis without discussing the ending. Near the end of the film, the cruelty of the Marshalls ramps up as they threaten to genocide all of the indigenous life forms—adorable shaggy centipede-like creatures called Creepers. Both Mickeys, Nasha, and one of the science team work to save the Creepers, but it is Mickey 18 who dies while killing Marshall and saving Mickey 17. It’s a lackluster death scene for a character whose anger at the Marshalls and the other passengers—except Nasha—builds and builds throughout the film. He’s Chekov’s hand grenade of barely checked rage, but when he finally goes off, the result is more of a standard sacrificial lamb than it is the revolution from Bong’s earlier work Snowpiercer (2013), which posits that it is better for humanity to die than it is for the cruel cycle of exploitation to continue.

The other issue is in the epilogue to the film, which takes place six months after the deaths of Mickey 18 and Marshall. The film reveals that Nasha decided to fix the system by running for the controlling committee of the ship—essentially their legislative branch—and using her new powers to eliminate the Expendables program. Everyone is happy; the colony is proceeding with its expansion more ethically; and Mickey now works with the scientists to establish communication and diplomatic relations with the Creepers. If this ending had been presented as more satire, it may have worked, but there is no indication of anything other than sincerity here. There is a complete disregard of systemic critique in favor of cheap shots at individual leaders. Once the cartoonish villains are eliminated and the “right people” are voted into office, the film seems to say, then everything will be all right. It’s fine that the scientists who literally tortured Mickey for four and a half years were never punished for their complicity in Marshall’s schemes and their creation of a lethal gas because they now work with Mickey, which seems like the most cruel thing the movie does to the character.

One odd scene involving Mickey 17 telling dream versions of the Marshalls to “fuck off” during a nightmare about their return to power seems to indicate that perhaps Bong thought that the US would not reelect Trump, but in the wake of the 2024 election and the subsequent dismantling of the US government, this scene reads as incredibly naive and silly. The truth is that not one individual is responsible for a genocide or for capitalist oppression of the working class, which ironically is something Bong was praised for portraying in Snowpiercer and Parasite (2019). Mickey 17 unfortunately doesn’t have the teeth of either of those films, which hampers its social critique.

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