Mickey 17 may not be my preferred mode of Bong Joon-Ho, but it’s the mode we need right now.
This is Bong as madcap, science-fiction prophet (Snowpiercer, Okja) rather than playful observer of human depravity (Parasite, Mother, Memories of Murder). As such, Mickey 17 is messy and a bit message-y. But this is a year in which any voice decrying cruel and rampant dehumanization—especially with this level of imagination and ingenuity—is a precious one.
Based on a 2022 novel by Edward Ashton, Mickey 17 stars Robert Pattinson in the title role. In the year 2054, Mickey works for an interplanetary mission as an “expendable”—someone subjected to risky tasks that often result in death. Each time he’s killed, a fresh version of his body is “printed” and Mickey’s memories are uploaded into it, allowing him to get back to work. When we first meet Mickey, he’s already died 16 times.
Dark stuff, but if you know Bong’s films, you won’t be surprised to find this premise played for broad (if bleak) laughs. How did Mickey find himself in this situation? Back on earth, he had fallen into debt to a loan shark after unwisely investing in an anti-meat, fast-food business called Macaroons Are Not a Sin. Unsurprisingly, it went bust. To avoid having his legs busted as well (or worse), Mickey joined an experimental expedition to colonize a distant ice planet. When it came to signing his “expendable” contract, Mickey admits, “I should have read through it.” (Commence carefully scrutinizing any Amazon “terms of service” you’ve ever agreed to.)
Pattinson is absolutely in on the joke, seemingly modeling his performance on the Three Stooges (he has Mo’s haircut and Curly’s nasally, dim-witted patter). Like other characters in Bong’s filmography—say, the arrested, developmentally delayed son in 2009’s Mother—Mickey’s mental gears appear to grind a bit more slowly than most people’s, making him particularly vulnerable in an increasingly callous society. Pattinson brings a slapstick element to his performance—there’s a great bit where he tumbles down some stairs—but he also taps into the pathos he brought to The Rover, where he played a mentally challenged man trying to make sense of a violent, post-apocalyptic landscape. Mickey is something like Forrest Gump—if he lived in a world where that floating feather was doomed to land in an incinerator.
As we learn more about the world of Mickey 17, Bong forgoes the clockwork precision that made Parasite so brilliant in favor of scattershot ambition. Not every shot lands and there may be a few too many characters (the script tragically underserves both Steven Yeun and Toni Collette), but there are still plenty of touches that prophetically hit their mark. Each time a “new” Mickey comes rolling out of the printer, it’s both a cleverly goopy sight gag and a commentary on the indifference with which laborers are treated in the global economy. (At one point, Mickey flops onto the ground like dead fish because the scientists have forgotten to provide a gurney to catch him.) An entire plotline involves creatures discovered on the planet—something like giant, hairy pill bugs—evoking questions of both animal cruelty and creation care. Here, Mickey 17 recalls the mournful, elegiac manner of Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, employing fantasy and science fiction to call out humanity for our rapaciousness.
Then there is Mark Ruffalo’s Kenneth Marshall, a failed politician who has convinced his most fervent followers to join him on his expedition to establish a “better” human society (albeit one built on the backs of people like Mickey). It’s almost shocking how clearly Marshall functions as an Elon Musk/Donald Trump hybrid, given that the movie was in production well before those two came to dominate the world stage with exactly the sort of inhumanity—in the supposed name of capitalist efficiency—that Mickey 17 depicts. Like Musk (and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos), Marshall has an obsession with both space and systemization, limiting his interplanetary employees to rationed cubes of protein while enjoying steaks in his suite. Like Trump, he has a flair for showmanship (hosting a talk show on board the spaceship) and flagrant religious hypocrisy. One of my favorite bits comes during a speech in which Marshall decries something as “Satan’s work” while flashing the sign of the horns behind his back.
Musk and Trump are dangerous clowns, which is exactly how Marshall is portrayed (Ruffalo, tapping into his Poor Things gear, devours the role). Because we’re currently stuck in that duo’s sick circus, Mickey 17’s relatively happy ending is, perhaps, where the movie’s prescience falters. I’d like to hang onto the hope that the movie offers, but at the moment that feels naive—especially in a country that, like Mickey, really should have read the fine print.
(3/13/2025)
