Directed by Bong Joon Ho

In my opinion, this is one of the most interesting film concepts of the year so far: A man hired to die over and over again, growing increasingly aware of his own disposability, all while managing a complicated romantic relationship with his coworker and hiding from his deranged, power-hungry, evil-doing boss.

In Mickey 17, director Bong Joon Ho shares a futuristic dark comedy that’s half corporate satire, half human-cloning-based thriller (?), with a little space travel, revolution, and philosophical pondering sprinkled in.

The plot

After a failed bakery business brushes them up against a chainsaw-wielding loan shark, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) and Timo (Steven Yeun) flee Earth, signing up to join a new-planet colonization mission. Timo is a skilled pilot, but Mickey is pushed into becoming an “expendable,” one of the necessary but unlucky suckers tasked with performing deadly tasks, dying, and getting reprinted via a cloning machine that implants human memories. They head out for Niflheim. The system works fine 17 times.

But Mickey 17 survives a mission he shouldn’t and comes back to find that Mickey 18 has already been printed in his place.

From there, somewhat predictably, chaos breaks out as the two clones sneak around trying to avoid detection on the spaceship colony led by the crazed egomaniac mission leader Kenneth (Mark Ruffalo), whose goal is a “racially pure” utopia on their new planet.

Once they land on Niflheim, they discover native inhabitants (which they name “Creepers”): globby, worm-like life forms with scary, gaping, teeth-filled mouth holes. Tensions rise between the human colonizers and the Creepers after two of the infant creatures are captured and one is killed by Mickey’s team.

At the same time, hiding the truth about Mickeys 17 and 18 becomes more and more difficult as their individual motives shift — 18 is angrier and more combative; 17 is meeker and more sentimental. Mickey’s girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) helps them navigate the situation after discovering and falling for both versions of her lover.

Oh, Kenneth is also, for some reason, developing a mystery meat that his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) seasons with a sauce made from the blood of the Creepers?

By the end, we’ve seen deeply sad sacrifices, extreme tests of loyalty, interspecial communication, and some steamy romance.

The actors

I’ve never seen Pattinson like this before. His affectation, his movement, everything was so different from his recent stuff — couldn’t have been further from Batman (2022), in a totally different world from, like, The Lighthouse (2019), and how is this even the same guy every teenaged girl sobbed over during the Twilight era? He impressed me a lot in this film.

I adored Ackie and Collette in their roles; they are a big part of what brings the film into its heightened reality and they both inject so much humor and fun to the story.

Steven Yeun can do no wrong.

My loud but not well-liked hot take that Poor Things (2023) was actually not that good was based partly on my distaste for Ruffalo’s performance there, which might have been clouding my judgement (because I don’t think I’ve seen him in anything new since then) but I had the same beef here. It feels like he’s acting. It feels so forced. He was a detractor for me on this one.

Final Thoughts

Mickey 17 has all the twists and turns of a quality thriller with a classic Bong Joon Ho message: no matter how many villains we kill, someone is always waiting to take their place. Themes of greed and systemic destruction are heavily present, as they are in many of Bong’s works (see Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017)), and I liked the political twinge we get from Kenneth & Ylfa (although, again, Ruffalo’s performance kind of just felt like a half-assed Trump impersonation…).

It isn’t subtle but it is effective. And more than anything it’s really, really fun to watch.

this movie is good.

My rating: 3.5/5

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