Mickey 17, writer-director Bong Joon Ho’s long-delayed follow-up to the internationally acclaimed, Best Picture–winning Parasite, arrives at a moment so apropos that its allegory lines up with our reality like a cutout dress on a paper doll. Had the film been released in March 2024 as planned, its darkly comic vision of a planetary labor colony ruled by an authoritarian billionaire (who also hosts a glitzy nightly TV show) still might have seemed like an urgent warning of what could be, rather than an unblinking depiction of what somehow now is.
Mickey 17, an adaptation of the 2022 graphic novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, begins in the year 2054 on the frozen planet of Niflheim. A lone man, Mickey (Robert Pattinson), lies on the floor of a deep ice cave, reflecting in voiceover on his impending death—but wait! Another man, Timo (Steven Yeun), suddenly appears and rappels down the cave wall, seeming to come to his buddy’s rescue. Halfway down, though, Timo stops, makes his excuses, and takes off, assuring Mickey that death by hypothermia won’t be such a big deal: After all, they’ll just print him out again tomorrow.
The first of many briskly edited flashbacks establishes that, four and one-third years before the main action of the movie begins, these two so-called friends were forced to flee Planet Earth when their macaron shop failed, leaving them in debt to a psychotic loan shark known for his love of torture. When the two signed on to work in the off-world colony, Mickey made the fatal mistake of not reading the fine print on his agreement to become an Expendable, a worker who, by means of a new biotechnology known as “human printing,” can be generated anew with the same memories every time he dies.
Mickey, Niflheim’s sole Expendable, serves as the Homo sapiens in the colony’s coal mine. If you need to develop a vaccine for an alien virus or test the breathability of a new atmosphere, Mickey’s your guy; when he dies in agony, only to have his body thrown down a chute into an organic-matter-recycling pit of fire, such is the price of progress. Or rather of profit, since the entirety of the value generated by Mickey’s disposable body goes into the sequin-studded pockets of the colony’s despotic ruler Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo). Marshall’s place in the Niflheim social order combines the offices of CEO, cult leader, celebrity, and high priest. He and his gourmet-food-obsessed wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) live in luxury while the rest of the camp subsists on gray slop dispensed from a giant tube.
The action kicks into gear when, thanks to an unexpected development I won’t spoil here, the Mickey of the title—the 17th of his kind, the one stranded on the floor of that ice cave—manages to escape and make his way back to his barracks in the colony. There he finds a surly copy of himself waiting: Mickey 18, who has been printed already on the assumption that No. 17 must be dead. The simultaneous existence of multiple Expendables is forbidden by interplanetary law, so the two Mickeys, each insistent on his own right to continue existing, must agree to split both their brutal workload and their scanty meals. Toughest of all for Mickey 17, he also finds himself sharing his girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a colony security guard with an insatiable sex drive, with his newly printed counterpart.
The Mickeys, though genetically identical, have starkly different personalities, each seeming to express a separate element of the original Mickey’s character: No. 17 is an anxious people-pleaser with a nasal whine of a voice, while No. 18 is a testy alpha male with a streak of political rebellion. (Nasha, delighted to find herself in bed between two identical suitors, dubs them “Mild Mickey” and “Habanero Mickey.”) This conceit, in addition to raising questions about the nature of personal identity, gives Pattinson the chance to switch between two distinct characters, a task he more than delivers on and clearly relishes. Even when he’s standing still in the background of a shot, it’s evident which incarnation he’s playing, and as the tension between the Mickeys mounts, we start to see how each one relies on the other to navigate a world in which both are considered less than human.
The second half of the film revolves around the doubles’ first farcical, then dangerous attempts to pass themselves off as the same person (or are they the same person?). Meanwhile, the Niflheim settlement confronts a new challenge: A species indigenous to the planet, an oddly cute insectlike being that resembles a giant tardigrade, is swarming en masse outside the colony walls. The climactic sequence, in which the humans and the pillbugs face off in a blustering snowstorm worthy of Hoth, blends the grand-scale action of an Empire Strikes Back–style space epic with the more contemplative sci-fi of a movie in the mode of Arrival. (As Inkoo Kang wrote in her 2019 profile of Bong for Slate, the director loves nothing more than to turn American classics inside out.)
Mickey 17 makes for a rollicking watch, with blackly funny dialogue, imaginative visual design, and lashings of grossout humor (emetophobes beware: there is a lot of barfing).
But it lacks the finely tooled structural perfection of a film like Parasite—it’s closer in tone, and nearly identical in theme, to Director Bong’s 2013 Snowpiercer, another English-language thriller based on a graphic novel about humans competing for resources in an icy dystopia. Mickey 17 has some narrative loose ends that suggest it was cut down from a longer version: An implied love story between two female characters feels strangely truncated, and the voiceover device is occasionally used to patch together story beats that seem to have been edited out. It could also be argued that Ruffalo’s performance as the loathsome Marshall, a caricature as deliberately over-the-top and almost as grating as Jake Gyllenhaal’s near-unwatchable turn in Bong’s 2017 animal-rights manifesto Okja, is a bridge too far—but again, the character’s near-perfect congruence with our contemporary political reality makes it hard to call the actor out for lack of subtlety. (Both Ruffalo and Bong have denied that the character was modeled on any particular world leaders, though Ruffalo has conceded that, given recent events, he now feels he “made a documentary.”)
Above all, Mickey 17 is remarkable for the savagery of its satire of 21st-century capitalism. The world Mickey inhabits, and into which he must be born and painfully die again and again, is one ruled entirely by the economy of extraction. New planets are sites to be plundered, their native life forms are nuisances to be exterminated, and human bodies are piles of organic matter to be exploited for their labor and then recycled like table scraps. This would be a message of unbearable cruelty if not for the filmmaker’s foundational humanism. Out of the nihilist wreckage of this all-too-recognizable dystopia, a deeply moving home truth begins to emerge: Every death matters. Every living body feels pain and fear and the innate drive to keep on living, and our moral imperative as a species is to create a social order that enables every being to fulfill the need not just to survive but to flourish. The path by which Mickey 17 arrives at that conclusion may be strewn with bodies, but the final scenes offer a ray of hope, a glimpse at the utopian possibility that even a man who’s died horribly 16 times can be born into a different life, one whose meaning derives from the fact that it’s ephemeral, unrepeatable, and uniquely his own.
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