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?
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