Parasite director Bong Joon-ho directs Robert Pattinson in a dark sci-fi satire filled with clones and creatures. Our review of Mickey 17:
As science fiction has so consistently pointed out, humanity’s flaws will follow us no matter how far into space we travel. Artificially-intelligent computers will glitch out and try to kill us because they’re the flawed products of a flawed species. We’ll go to other worlds and kill whatever creatures we might find there because, for some reason, we just can’t outrun our murderous, colonial past.
Mickey 17 is the latest film from writer-director Bong Joon-ho, a filmmaker who has long looked witheringly at our worst impulses. Coming almost six years after his Best Picture-winning thriller Parasite, this is a blackly comic sci-fi satire more of a piece with The Host, Snowpiercer or Okja – a more antic, scattershot genre piece, but no less pointed in its takedown of late capitalism than his 2019 Oscar-winner.
Robert Pattinson alternately channels and smothers his natural charisma as Mickey Barnes, a luckless everyman who, without reading the small print, joins a space expedition to the snowy planet, Niflheim. By 2059, scientists have figured out how to replicate a human’s consciousness and pump it into a 3D-printed replacement, which emerges from a machine that looks like a conveyor belt at a local supermarket. As Holliday Grainger’s corporate drone chirpily explains to Mickey on his first day on the job, scraps of food, excrement and dead bodies are all piped into the machine and used as raw materials for its human replicas.
As an Expendable, Mickey’s given the absolute worst jobs on the entire ship, whether it’s absorbing deadly solar radiation as he carries out repairs during a space walk, or repeatedly subjected to Niflheim’s microbe-ridden atmosphere to help scientists formulate a vaccine. Each time Mickey perishes, a new copy is printed out, allowing him to continue where he left off – with all the memories of pain and suffering he had before.
It’s a grim existence worthy of Greek myth, and made all the worse by the oppressive atmosphere on the ship itself. The prison-like vessel’s run by Kenneth Marshall, played by Mark Ruffalo, whose preening performance is like Marlon Brando impersonating Benito Mussolini. A failed politician and vain dictator, he rules the ship with his equally vapid wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), who’s unaccountably obsessed with cooking sauces. Marshall has a eugenicist’s plan to populate the new world with a ‘pure’ human race, and talks in quasi-religious terms about the best specimens aboard his ship spreading their seed across the planet.
In the meantime, food and sex are aggressively monitored on the ship, and Mickey – the product of trash that he is – is treated as a pariah by the rest of the crew. The one exception being Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a tough security agent who falls in love with Mickey in all his simple-minded innocence.
Matters are complicated when a mission to Niflheim’s surface goes awry, and the company, thinking Mickey has died yet again, goes ahead and prints out a replacement. Multiple clones are forbidden by law, and so with Mickeys 17 and 18 both facing the death penalty if their secret’s uncovered, they have to decide whether one should sacrifice themselves to save the other, or whether they should try to survive by trying to pass themselves off as one person.
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This is only a small sliver of a broader plot that also takes in alien creatures of various sizes, crackpot scientists, several murder attempts, and a failed macaron business. In adapting Edward Ashton’s novel – called Mickey 7 – Bong has given himself a lot of ground to cover, even in a film that runs to about 135 minutes. The result is a story that races headlong from one incident to the next as it tries to pay off all the plot points its first act has set up. Where Parasite felt precision-engineered, Mickey 17 feels loose and occasionally meandering.
Bong’s taste for the outrageous and operatic also returns with a flourish, and Ruffalo’s performance as the director’s latest absurdist villain makes Tilda Swinton’s turn as a post-apocalyptic Thatcher on rails look positively restrained. Mickey himself is a cartoonish figure; a mumbling dogsbody who acts a little like a distant ancestor of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp. Pattinson brings real soul to his dual performance, however, and distinguishes Mickey’s younger intended replacement, number 18, by playing him with a contrasting streak of darkness.
It’s never quite clear where that darkness came from, though, and there are moments in Bong’s film where plot developments hinge on its characters doing things that in a more sombrely-performed film would seem irrational. One character’s attitude and appearance changes so drastically at one stage, in fact, that it’s a wonder whether it’s the result of reshoots or perhaps a deleted scene.
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All the same, Mickey 17 entertains as a midnight-black, broad satire. Its depiction of a future where scientific advancements are accompanied by religious zealotry, greed and despotism feel more plausible now than they might have even a few months ago. The sight of a conspicuously rich leader doing what looks uncannily like a riff on a Nazi salute, the camera catching the glint of the gold watch on his extended wrist, now looks almost prophetic.
Mickey 17 also feels surprisingly British in its tone and voice; not just because of its actors, which include This Is England’s Thomas Turgoose and comedian and poet Tim Key (the latter wearing a pigeon costume for much of the movie), but also in its downbeat, industrial feel; Bong has talked in interviews about his affection for directors like Ken Loach, and it shows here. It’s as British-feeling as seaside towns, eccentric garden shed inventors and Doctor Who.
As a piece of sci-fi, Mickey 17 reads like a mix of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers' military fascism, the blue collar futurism of Peter Hyams’ underrated Outland, and an array of films about clones where mentioning their names could constitute a spoiler. The production design, by Fiona Crombie, is similarly bold; big, utilitarian vehicles rumble across Niflheim’s landscape, populated by creatures filled with both otherworldliness and recognisable personality. There are also pleasing details that could have come from a Douglas Adams novel; Mickey’s personality is stored in what looks like a cross between a house brick and a portable radio from the 1980s. Why? It’s never explained, and that’s just fine.
Like Bong’s other dystopias, Mickey 17 explores how various systems – religion, capitalism, power-mad politicians, petty workplace managers – conspire to control us, number us and put us in neat boxes. But Bong Joon-ho also suggests that the messy, nurturing, loving, animal bit of us will always rebel in some form, and in that, at least, Mickey 17 offers a rare, disarming sense of hope.
Mickey 17 is out in UK cinemas on the 7th March 2025.
