Mickey 17 and all the images you see in this review are owned by Warner Bros Pictures
Directed by Bong Joon-Ho
This has been a tough year for a lot of people, least of all me, as I’ve been severely unmotivated to keep things going around here. This ennui is not helped by the less than stellar slate of movies we’ve gotten so far, some of which I’m gonna try and knock out a few reviews for when I’m feeling up to it, but even amidst the fog of banality, there was a ray of sunshine on the horizon with this latest feature by Bong Joon-Ho starring one of my favorite actors today. With so much going wrong in the world, can this prove to be a bright spot to make things feel a little bit better? Let’s find out!!
Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is not living his best life on Earth, and like many of us, decides to travel to try and find himself. Well, that and escape debt collectors with chainsaws, but in any case, he and his buddy Timo (Steven Yeun) queue up to get onboard the Nifilheim which is a ship intended to colonize a distant ice planet run by the overtly sinister Mr. and Mrs. Marshall (Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette) who seem to have given up on making Earth Great Again, and are looking for a do-over in their own little fiefdom in space. Timo gets a spot for being a decent pilot, but since Mickey’s only skill is his desperation to escape, he signs up to be an Expendable; basically a worker bee whose DNA is kept on file and gets printed out whenever the current version of him dies. I suppose dying of solar radiation and maintenance blunders is better than getting a chainsaw to the face, but after four years and sixteen dead copies behind him, he’s found himself in a bit of a rut; especially when the planet turns out to have a bunch of creatures on it that is hindering their colonization efforts. Still, at least between his immortality and his new girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie), he’s managed to find some stability in his life. That is until he comes back from a particularly nasty day out in the snow and realizes that the crew already declared him dead and printed out the eighteenth Mickey. Not only is this new Mickey kind of a jerk, it’s also against protocol for more than one Expendable to exist at the same time, which could mean his Get Out of Death Free card will be revoked; probably via a bullet to the head or a tumble into the engine’s exhaust pipe. Can Mickey and Mickey work together to keep each other alive and out of sight from the ship’s wrathful captain? What is the Niflheim’s ultimate plan for this new world, and what would it mean for the native species whose home they are invading? I suppose this is the best Mickey could hope for, given who’s in charge. After all, who needs health insurance when you’ve got the ultimate 3D printer?
With Snowpiercer, Parasite and now this, Bong Joon-Ho is swiftly becoming the most politically relevant filmmaker in Hollywood, and is frankly everything that the most recent Captain America movie should have been. As much as I found to like in Brave New World, it’s only becoming more and more clear that this is the time for bold messaging instead of toothless critiques, and while this movie has sadly been overlooked by general audiences, it’s absolutely the movie we need for this dreadful moment in history. Of course, saying something like that is likely to turn some people away, so let me push that aside for now and just say how much fun this movie is as a goofy sci-fi romp. The premise here is well realized and thoughtfully executed, in conjunction with Pattinson’s aw-shucks Everyman performance to tell a very human story amidst the humming of the engines and the madness of the science. Mickey is an interesting guy, and perhaps a very relatable one as he’s aimless, makes bad decisions out of desperation, and carries his trauma with him as society seems to have no interest in helping him deal with it properly. The disposability of his own flesh and blood feels almost inevitable even before he gets the reset button, and Pattinson does a great job of exploring that sense of isolation from the world around him in between the slapstick shenanigans. I think that’s what I gravitated to most in this movie; how it manages to be scathing in its criticisms of society without losing its sense of humor or succumbing to a nihilistic perspective. The movie can be profoundly sad at points, yet ultimately hopeful in a way that got to me in a way that few films manage to do. It’s the main reason I would place this movie this over Parasite which was just as smart, but decided to go for a mostly bitter, light on sweet, ending whereas this feels significantly more comforting in its messaging.
The rest of the cast does their job well, but are either secondary to Mickey’s story or wildly outlandish caricatures to drive home the political messaging. Naomi Ackie makes the most of what she is expected to do, and the plot takes some interesting turns with her that kept me guessing as to what role she would ultimately play in this story, but the standouts are definitely Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette as the sinister leaders of this operation wearing their best Trumpian sneers. A dystopian sci-fi comedy like this needs a strong villain to anchor it, but doing a Trump riff ten years after it stopped being novel was a risky proposition that could have undercut the entire movie’s themes. Fortunately, Ruffalo makes the most of this chance to spoof someone he clearly despises, and Collette brings a lot of pathos to the both of them as their relationship is utterly repellant to watch but still feels genuine; or at least as genuine as it can be between two clearly narcissistic Fascists. Of course, they’re only the most visible manifestation of the ethical rot that lies at the heart of the world, and it has that unique quality that crops up in a lot of Hollywood films from foreign directors where Americans are forced to see ourselves the way the rest of the world does. It’s bad enough to have this scathing commentary about Late Stage Capitalism be a perfect mirror of the current state of the world, but there’s somehow an even more shameful aspect of it that seems to have come about by accident; or fate if you’re feeling a little more grim about it. Without going into details, the director clearly thought that things had gotten as bad as they would get back when he started making this in 2022, and it adds even more weight to the film’s messaging that this director, who I will remind you made the incredibly bleak Parasite, still thought better of us than we thought about ourselves.
The movie is not without its flaws, and for the most part I’d put it down to the script being a little overcooked. It’s not a particularly long film at just over two hours, but it does feel like there were a few indulgences that were fun in their own right but hampered the overall narrative. With a story like this, there is a lot of room for ambiguity for audiences to fill in themselves, but Bong Joon-Ho doesn’t seem to have wanted any aspect of this to remain unaddressed, so he sits us down for a couple of asides that stop the rest of the movie dead in its tracks. Like I said, they are entertaining, especially the story about why multiples of clones are so aggressively policed, but it makes the world feel a little bit small to have the margins so clearly defined. The one exception to the overtightened screws is with a secondary romantic interest that feels like it should have been a significant plot twist, but at best feels like a red herring. The film is based on a book, one that I’d never even heard of, so it’s possible that this is something carried over from the source material, but this is the challenge of adaptation and Bong Joon-Ho makes so many great filmmaking elsewhere that these clunky moments stand out all the more.
The first few months of any year are often the least interesting when it comes to movies, as the big hitters wait until the summer to start ramping things up. We can only hope that this will be the case for 2025, the most cursed of all years, but for now I feel confident that this will wind up being one of the best of the year as soon as people actually get around to seeing it. It certainly gets my recommendation and is well worth your time to see it in a theater, especially since it will be mostly empty, and you’ll have a shot at getting one of the good seats! The box office has never been fair, and plenty of great movies have fallen through the cracks only to become cultural touchstones after the fact. I can only hope that this movie finds its audience, and while I don’t hope that it stays relevant for too much longer as I doubt I can handle another four years of this nonsense, it is definitely a perfect movie for this moment and certainly makes the world a little more bearable while we try to get our act together.
The Reviewers Unite 