Review: MICKEY 17

 by Rob DiCristino

A film by Bong Joon Ho, for better and worse.

“What does it feel like to die?” is probably the question Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is asked the most. Mickey has died a lot, you see. He dies almost every day! It’s an essential part of his work as an “expendable,” one of the all-purpose utility workers granted passage to the new human colony of Nilfiem — and in Mickey’s case, away from unpaid debts on Earth — with the understanding that he will perform the menial, degrading, and flat-out lethal jobs that none of the other colonists would be willing or able to take on. What kinds of jobs? How about strapping himself to the hull of a transport ship to test the effects of space radiation on the human body? How about exposing himself to infectious diseases so that scientists can use his rancid blood to develop a vaccine? How about taking a weeks-long trek across frozen tundra to capture one of the vicious “creepers” that threaten the new colony? Mickey has done it all, dying over and over again just to give his fellow Nilfiemites — including his true love, Naomi Ackie’s Nasha — a chance to live.

The secret to Mickey’s longevity is human replication technology — illegal on Earth but unregulated in the colonies — that stores his consciousness on a hard drive and prints identical copies of his body on demand. Mickey remembers each of his lives, but he’d prefer not to discuss the periods of darkness in between. Nilfeim is scary enough as it is, what with its populist senator-turned-religious idol Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, whose insincere smile nearly collapses under the weight of his oversized veneers) and his ghoulishly-manicured wife (Toni Collette as the sauce-obsessed Ylfa) promising to build a “pure white” utopia on the backs of laborers like Mickey, Nasha, and Timo (Stephen Yeun), Mikey’s former partner and co-owner of his debts back on Earth. Still, Mickey gets along happily enough until he returns from a mission and finds another copy — 18 to his 17 — asleep in his bed. Now, the two Mickeys must lead a revolution against the Marshalls, protect the actually-innocent creepers, and prevent their own execution for crimes against metaphysics.

Based on the 2022 novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, Mickey 17 continues Bong Joon Ho’s signature exploration of class struggle with a pitch-black action/comedy combining the environmental dystopia of Snowpiercer, the interspecies empathy of Okja, and the anti-capitalist primal scream of Parasite. Mickey’s world is one of absurdist despair straight out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel, a place where plastic oligarchs and toiling retches fight over the rotting corpse of a collapsed society. Grifting buffoons like the Marshalls have resorted to gloried televangelism to stave off ruin, preaching belligerent xenophobia to a flock of red-hatted sycophants — Bong threads in more than a few references to our current “circumstances” in his adapted screenplay — in service of a corporate sponsor eager to exploit them all. In other words, Mickey 17 is Bong in his loudest, most ostentatious, most “fuck-you-I-made-Parasite” gear yet, giving us an unhinged romp that transmutes Ashton’s harder sci-fi premise into the very maxiest of maximalist social satire.

At the center of it all is Robert Pattinson, playing Mickey as a reedy-voiced golden retriever who sees his servile position as cosmic retribution for causing the car crash that killed his mother. It’s here that Bong roots the most interesting — and regretfully unexplored — of Mickey 17’s themes: Rather than providing him with a new purpose, immortality is actually a punishment for Mickey, a reminder that he is of such low stature that there’s no hope to build a real life. It’s a great bit of character work that adds a personal touch to Bong’s larger treatise on, well, you know, the way capitalism sucks us all dry. Even Mickey 18 — a bad boy, or at least badder boy than Mickey 17; turns out copies don’t share the same temperament — looks down on his older brother, and Pattinson’s best performance bits come when Eighteen tries to shake Seventeen out of his eternal malaise. Perhaps already the best male actor of his generation, Robert Pattinson is nothing short of incredible here, delivering a pair of distinct performances precisely attuned to his director’s sensibilities.

But not even a spectacular leading man can save Mickey 17 from the chaos of its second hour, when Bong’s eagerness to ping-pong between genres and tones muddies the narrative waters and robs his action-packed climax of the emotional resonance it probably deserves. It’s not that these later movements aren’t engaging; there’s a fun sojourn into a cave where Mickey learns to speak creeper, a dinner party that ends with orange bile spewed all over fine home furnishings, and what can only be described as a “slapstick threesome” bit that gives Naomi Ackie a chance to shine. The trouble is that these scenes feel unwieldy when viewed in a sequence, which kills the momentum of the first half and leaves several characters stranded in the margins. Mickey 18 is the chief casualty here — he’s introduced with a bang before getting lost in the noise — and a subplot about Timo’s drug business is so undercooked that it could have been excised entirely. Bong may be veering from Parasite’s razor-sharp precision on purpose, but a bit more discipline would have gone a long way.

Still, it’s impossible not to appreciate a film this nakedly vulnerable, a film that rages against the death of our collective humanity with such genuine insight, dexterity, and bombast. Every generation needs a Catch-22, after all. Every generation needs a Brazil, a Slaughterhouse Five, or even a Dr. Strangelove. Every generation needs a story that celebrates the individual’s endurance in the face of oppression and brutality, and if Mickey 17 inspires a young person to speak out against the cold indifference of the universe, then that more than makes up for any quibbles I might have about its pacing and character arcs. Emboldened by Parasite’s mainstream success, Bong saw fit to offer us a mixtape of his most ardent passions and preoccupations. It’s a digest that may feel repetitive for longtime fans — perhaps even redundant to those cineastes who found these ideas better represented in other films — but it’s sure to draw an entire host of new Bong devotees from the ranks of the very unwashed masses who might need to hear his voice the most.

Mickey 17 hits U.S. theaters today, Friday, March 7th.