Bong Joonho, “Mickey 17” (2025)
Based on the science fiction novel “Mickey 7” by Edward Ashton, “Mickey 17” takes that novel’s premise – a space colonist who undertakes the most dangerous jobs on a colonisation mission on an alien world and who is cloned repeatedly with all his memories intact each and every time he dies – and turns it into a satirical exploration of current Western politics, especially when it intersects with ego, greed, power and fundamentalist religion, in a dysfunctional society that is also obsessed with class and racial hierarchies. The constant changes from slapstick comedy to absurdist drama to horror and back again and again, while mirroring the main character’s adventures through several incarnations, dominate the satire and render it thin, with parts of it underdeveloped, and leaving most characters similarly flat, no more than one-dimensional stereotypes. Boasting good actors like Robert Pattinson, who plays the various Mickeys, and Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette both chewing the scenery with their villainous roles, the film nevertheless treats their characters and others as little more than cartoon creatures.
In the year 2054, Mickey Barnes and his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) try to escape a loan shark after their business venture fails by signing on as crew members on a space colonisation project, led by failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Ruffalo) and his manipulative wife (Collette) of the distant planet Niflheim. While Timo becomes a pilot, Mickey has to work as the spaceship’s “expendable” – a worker assigned to the worst and most dangerous jobs on board, constantly cloned and regenerated with his memories transferred through dubious technologies banned on Earth, every time he dies. During the four-year journey to Niflheim, Mickey meets and falls in love with security agent Nasha (Naomi Ackie).
On arrival at Niflheim, the spaceship scientists use Mickey as a guinea pig to test various vaccines that will enable the Earth crew to survive the pathogens on Niflheim, racing through several iterations of Mickey as they do so. Mickey No 17 is eventually allowed out of the ship with Timo to collect an indigenous life-form called a creeper but has an accident and is left for dead by Timo. Mickey is surprised when the creepers rescue him and he returns to the ship only to discover that his 18th iteration is already up and about, and romancing Nasha. After a fight, the two Mickeys reconcile and, despite their different natures (Mickey 18 being more aggressive and brash than Mickey 17), decide to work together with Nasha. However, after a series of incidents in which Mickey 17 is poisoned by lab meat and Marshall narrowly escapes assassination, both Mickeys are found out and – since only one clone can exist at a time – the two clones are punished by Marshall by being sent out into the wilderness, with remote-controlled bombs attached to them, to collect the creepers’ tails. Using a translation device given him by the spaceship researchers, Mickey 17 communicates with the creepers and learns that they intend to kill the humans unless he returns a captured baby creeper and surrenders one human to be killed as compensation for the earlier death of another baby creeper. In the meantime, Marshall and his advisors plot to exterminate all the creepers with poison gas.
The film manages to tackle the issue of whether expendable humans like Mickey and his 17 clones deserve fair and better treatment as labourers doing all the heavy lifting for Marshall’s colonisation project while Marshall, his wife and other elite members in the project are paid handsomely and live luxurious lives for doing basically nothing. The spaceship is a microcosm of Western capitalist society taken to its extremes – though it might be said that imperialism and a racially organised society prepared to use cloning and racial hygiene to achieve certain goals already represent the ultimate extremes of exploitive capitalist ideology. In this scenario, Ruffalo’s character represents a mishmash of all the various infamous political autocrats and other cult leaders who have led their societies on a road to ruin with dangerous ideologies and value systems. Tackling class inequalities, the Western colonial / imperialist legacy and the issue of genocide of indigenous societies in order to steal their lands and resources, the film ends up a confused melange of ideas all deserving serious and profound attention and treatment, and getting none.
Undoubtedly the star of this film is Pattinson who does virtuoso work in playing two characters with very different temperaments – an idea in itself which deserves further investigation: are Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 naturally opposite in character or were their differences engineered by the spaceship researchers somehow for different tasks? – though the essential Mickey is an ordinary everyday non-heroic type who’s not too bright and really only wants to stay out of trouble. (Had director Joonho Bong made this film in his native South Korea, he would have had Kangho Song, who has made a specialty playing working-class characters with plenty of street cunning and not much intellect, starring as Mickey.) Ruffalo and Collette’s characters are basically played for laughs, at least until their characters actually turn nasty and vicious (a reflection of real-world Western politicians whose incompetence and stupidity are surpassed only by their thirst for war and brutal violence). Other less well-known actors like Ackie hold up their own but their characters are hampered by a lack of development and depth.
The film might have worked out better had it been conceived as a television series, so that its themes and ideas would receive better and deeper treatment, and allow the various characters to grow and develop, and eventually to redeem themselves in saving the colony and the creepers alike.