B

Wacky, angry, shaggy sci-fi Mickey 17 works its underclass to the clone

Bong Joon Ho follows up his Best Picture win by combining his pet themes into a messy, hilarious sci-fi.

Wacky, angry, shaggy sci-fi Mickey 17 works its underclass to the clone
Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste

The meek will inherit the planet…that we travel to after rich people ruin Earth. And, after the terrible 1% are physically prevented from ruining humanity’s next go at things. This is the heart of Mickey 17’s unwieldy, long-winded, wildly entertaining sci-fi critique of our dehumanizing present. Whether that cruelty derives from a reactionary, religious, or capitalist perspective—or the unholy throuple they’ve formed in America—it’s aimed here at the expendable labor force upon which the film’s spacefaring future is built. Bong Joon Ho follows up the searing Parasite with a far sillier film that adds 10 Mickeys to Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7 and iterates upon the filmmaker’s previous genre movies, combining the rundown, frozen, end-of-the-world aesthetic of Snowpiercer with the clownishness and critters of Okja. Bong’s haphazard Mickey 17 nearly comprises as many tones, spanning light farce and sprawling epic as it works its underclass down to the clone.

The interplanetary colonization foreseen by Mickey 17 relies on a foundation of blue-collar schmucks who live, die, and repeat thanks to a fancy 3D printer that cranks out a new worker—replete with all their memories—every time the previous version bites the dust. The movie Mickey 17 relies on Robert Pattinson, who plays said schmucks. Mickey isn’t special, despite a gratuitous loan shark subplot emphasizing just how desperate he is. He’s just broke, alone, and out of options. Plenty can relate, even if the Earth isn’t yet being sandblasted so badly by dust storms that folks are fleeing off-world. Seeing an easy way out of his dead-end life, Mickey agrees to end up dead. Over and over and over. Under late capitalism, one doesn’t even get to die easily. It wouldn’t be a Bong sci-fi without a blunt metaphor at its center, but the cyclical tragedy of Mickey’s poverty-driven circumstances are also rife with comedy.

Much like Edge Of Tomorrow or other consequence-free time loops played for laughs, Mickey’s frequent mortality puts his body through the wringer as his crew heads to the ice world of Niflheim. More specifically, the higher-ups on his spaceflight treat him like a lab rat, poisoning, irradiating, and otherwise torturing a man they’ve been conditioned not to think twice about. Forcing humanity onto a planet named for the chilliest section of the Norse afterlife requires plenty of trial and error. Pattinson, skinny and hunched and affecting a perfectly weaselly voice he modulates between versions of Mickey, greets the punishment like a beaten-down service worker heading to his opening shift. His resignation—he all but mugs a Flintstones-like “Eh, it’s a living” to the camera as he heads to his certain demise—makes the over-the-top villainy of the ship’s young science team (led by an excellently dopey Cameron Britton) all the funnier. 

But when the adorable, furry, giant grub-like “creepers” who populate the underground tunnels of Niflheim save a soon-to-be-dead Mickey on one of his suicide missions, those manning the printer jump the gun and crank out another Mickey before the current one kicks the bucket. Mickeys 17 and 18—the former squirrelly and docile, the latter confident and aggressive—must then fight over who gets to be with their wild-card girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie), what they should do about their colony’s egomaniacal leader (Mark Ruffalo), and how they’re going to hide that they’re both alive at the same time. The penalty for there being “multiples” is deletion of the printer data; capital punishment for a person whose job description is dying.

After this opening sequence, which blends exposition that seems added in after the fact with an onslaught of punchlines, Bong’s film goes through about as many narrative detours as it does Mickeys. While the Mickeys serve as perspective characters for this farcical fable about labor exploitation—and as narrators for the film’s unsteady timeline—they only make up a fraction of the story. 

The Scientology-skewering business/church behind the Niflheim expedition preaches its vague gospel. Those preachers are goofy Western caricatures (like Okja): Ruffalo does a toothy Trump impression by way of late-era Marlon Brando while Toni Collette does her best Tilda Swinton as his sauce-obsessed wife. Both have red-capped devotees; the former even gets grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet. Among the other passengers, an enjoyably silly, ridiculously horny love triangle between the Mickeys and Nasha threatens to add another vertex. Steven Yeun deals huffable drugs (like Snowpiercer). A guy is inexplicably running around in a pigeon mascot suit. And that’s just what’s going on with the humans! The Ghibli-like plight of the creepers eventually expands until it becomes the focal point of the film.

Bong piles more and more of his interests and insights into the 137 minutes of Mickey 17 until it’s as shaggy as its alien worms. The satire goes as broad and shocking as Starship Troopers, and can veer back to an earnestness that wouldn’t feel out of place in any other blockbuster. Some components, like the charming creepers, could hold up whole movies by themselves. Others—like the breeding fantasies of the ship’s leaders, their quasi-racist ideology, and the guy with a soul patch piercing who follows them around—feel like anxious broadsides aimed at too many targets. (This feeling also arises during the film’s angriest moments, profane tirades that are less speeches and more release valves.) 

But, messy as it is, the filmmaking so energetically delivers its acidic pessimism that it’s rarely unpleasant. Bong’s visual gags and Jung Jae-il’s parodic music are shot through with bitterness. The characters are all too odd to ever truly be familiar; Pattinson in particular relishes in creating a pair of completely distinct little gremlins. Bong coaxes out empathy, but towards disgusting-cute creatures. Humans have had their chance. Maybe they’ll get a second one, if they’re bold enough to rise up against all the forces keeping them down. The shotgun approach to this message means that none of its pellets make full contact—the Trump imagery is too literal, the cloned labor concept too secondary, the violent takeover of another world too played out—but who can blame Bong for unloading so spectacularly? It’s bad out there and, unlike Mickey, we’re on our last life.

Director: Bong Joon Ho
Writer: Bong Joon Ho
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo
Release Date: March 7, 2025

 
Join the discussion...