"Mickey 17" review — This job is (literally) out to kill you
“You’re an expendable! You’re here to be expended.”
When you’ve experienced death sixteen times, it can be easy to feel like you’re living in some sort of cosmic, karmic punishment. Maybe the universe is retaliating against something in your past that haunts you. Maybe it’s a way of reminding you of your profound insignificance against the supreme, ceaseless sublime horror of infinite space. Maybe it’s just a cruel joke, like God himself is taking delight in your suffering. Or, maybe you just didn’t read the terms and conditions all the way through on your application to join a four-year journey across the cosmos. Either way, dying sucks. Or so says, Mickey Barnes, a crewmember aboard a deep space journey to colonize a far-off world, who’s done the whole “death” thing a few times already. Taking the Star Trek concept of the “expendable crewman” to the next level, Mickey’s entire job is to enter extremely dangerous situations, probably die in the process, and then be brought back to life via cloning just to do it all over again. He’s died of mysterious airborne viruses, nerve gas, solar radiation, workplace accidents, and more. It’s not a pleasant job — and a job that’s very illegal back home on Earth — but someone has to do it. All in the name of exploration, I guess.
When the film opens, we find Mickey (played by Robert Pattinson) stuck in a cave in the icy world of Niflheim, the future prospective home of this batch of human explorers, now on his seventeenth life and facing certain death once again. This time it’s a little different: he’s about to be eaten alive by the planet’s tardigrade-esque native creatures. He hasn’t been eaten alive before, and by aliens no less, so this particular death will be a new one. In the last moments of his incarnation, he recalls his late-minute escape from Earth, the strange world of the ship that had been his home for the last four years, his many previous deaths, and his passionate relationship with Nasha (played by Naomi Ackie). Back on the ice, Mickey’s long-time friend from Earth and prolific conman, Timo (played by Steven Yeun), stands far above him at the entrance of the cave looking down at his poor friend. He promises Mickey that he’ll see him in the morning before scampering away. Mickey sighs and resigns himself to the jaws of the monster that is waiting for him.
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| Naomi Ackie and Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17. Photo via Warner Bros. |
In case this short description of the rudimentary premise of Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 is not painfully clear enough, the film is a pretty biting and obvious satire of the material conditions of labour, taken to the extreme. Of course, if you saw his 2019 showstopper Parasite or other highlights from his filmmaking career, Bong is not one to deal with subtly. He presents his broad critiques of social class and capitalism with on-the-nose metaphors and outlandish portrayals of corporate greed. Have you ever felt like your crappy, dead-end job is killing you? Well, here, it literally is. With Mickey 17, his third English-language film and his biggest budget work to date, he makes no exception. Bong’s playing with familiar territory: sci-fi ethics, monsters, snowy landscapes, and exaggerated performances from some of the finest working actors today. While the film doesn’t come near the monumental heights of his masterpiece Parasite, which any attempt to top would be a fool’s errand, Mickey 17 is a pretty solid sci-fi blockbuster. Star Robert Pattinson delivers a terrific two-for-one performance with plenty of other memorable characters cropping up around him, Bong’s scripting is hilarious and imaginative as always, and the film culminates in a terrific, gratifying final act. And while the film’s CGI-heavy action sequences leave a little to be desired and its pacing can feel a little disorganized, the complaints always seem secondary to Bong’s sense of imagination.
To his great surprise, Mickey doesn’t die. In fact, the planet’s native creatures, lovingly called “creepers” by the humans, rescue him and bring him back to the surface. He crawls across the frozen landscape back to the ship that bore him and his comrades across the stars to recover. He survived. A rarity, to be sure. But when he stumbles back into his small, dingy apartment aboard the human spaceship, he finds a familiar face lying in his bed: another version of him. A “multiple.” An abomination. A legal, ethical, and religious nightmare that was one of the chief reasons the concept of expendables was made illegal back home on Earth. And if the rest of the crew were to find out, Mickey would most likely face permanent destruction. Robert Pattinson takes centre stage here as not one Mickey Barnes, but two: Mickey 17 and Mickey 18, two printings of the same man who are now locked in a struggle for survival. Pattinson is absolutely terrific here. As he alters his mannerisms and accent subtly for each of the two versions of Barnes, he creates two distinct, yet intertwined interpretations of the character and manages to play off of himself beautifully. Whilst the two Mickeys struggle to find their perfect work-life balance and a solution that won’t result in them both dead, the rest of the Niflheim expedition’s crew starts to be brought into the drama.
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| Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette in Mickey 17. Photo via Warner Bros. |
The supporting cast starts strong with Naomi Ackie as Nasha, Mickey’s long-time girlfriend who’s a little too excited about the prospect of dual Mickeys. Ackie is marvellous here. One of the most exciting rising stars at the moment after her turns in Kasi Lemmons’ Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody (2022) and Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut Blink Twice (2024), Ackie proves herself again here with a dynamic, energetic performance and serves as an emotional anchor for so much of the film. Mickey’s other friend is Timo, played by Steven Yeun, who made it aboard the expedition without having to resort to being an expendable. Yeun’s character is a perfectly sleazy and fickle conman whose exploits, failures, and near escapes are always a treat to stumble upon. But not everyone on board is on Mickey’s side. For the commander of the Niflheim mission, the failed congressman Kenneth Marshall with a mouth full of slightly-too-large veneers (played by Mark Ruffalo), this case of multiples puts him into a potentially disastrous situation with the local religious authority aboard the ship. His wife, Ylfa (played by Toni Collette), ever the schemer, sets her husband up for total war against the creepers as a way of saving his image as the unflappable leader. The Marshalls are a delightful pair of comically villainous presences here that are probably bound to invite comparisons to real-world political villains. Again, the politics here are hardly masked. But with two incredible performances from Ruffalo and Collette, the absence of subtlety hardly seems a negative.
Further, there’s so much to love about the film in its craft. The cinematography by Darius Khondji, the Iranian-French DOP behind many of the films of Michael Haneke and James Gray as well as Bong’s own Okja, is exciting and expressive. The editing by Yang Jin-mo, who also impeccably edited Parasite, is energetic and kinetic. Jung Jae-il’s score uses decidedly baroque inspiration to a riveting soundscape that slowly builds in ferocity, from its melodies driven by delicate pianos to large-scale orchestral pieces, to the film’s grand finale. Bong’s direction is as self-assured as ever. Effortlessly jumping between its comical, satirical, and dramatic tones, Bong pulls together what is probably his most accomplished English-language film. It is decidedly more expansive than Snowpiercer and more tonally unified than Okja, making its grand narrative feel all the more gratifying. But Mickey 17 is still far from Bong’s best work. Its narrative construction proves to be a notable drawback from the rest of the film.
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| Steven Yeun in Mickey 17. Photo via Warner Bros. |
While the performances and Bong’s sense of sci-fi imagination are two of the film’s highlights, and are largely what keeps Mickey 17 feeling so exciting and enjoyable, it is far from a perfect film. Even with its in media res set-up, Mickey 17 can’t quite avoid feeling like two awkwardly mixed halves. There are the various flashbacks and narrations that highlight both Mickey’s chaotic life on Earth — including a failed macron business with Timo — and the four-year voyage across the cosmos that featured the development of his relationship with Nasha and his first sixteen deaths and then there is the actual meat of the film of the double Mickeys on Niflheim and the plight of the creepers. With the way the film is edited, everything before Niflheim feels like pure prelude, but a prelude that seems to take too much time and yet is full of the film’s most interesting character beats and moments. It is an unfortunate narrative discomfort in an otherwise satisfying satire. One cannot help but feel curious to see what would happen if the film had been rewritten, or re-edited, in a way that would overlay Mickey’s first sixteen lives in a more meaningful way with the main conflict, surrounding the antagonism between the human colonial mission and the native species.
Despite my discomfort with its narrative execution, I find Mickey 17 to be a very enjoyable sci-fi kick. The large-scale, big-budget excitement of Mickey 17, combined with its sense of originality and stand-out performances, makes it a worthwhile blockbuster. While its current commercial performance is a disappointment, don’t let that keep you away from seeing this in theatres. Bong, a foundational voice of 21st-century South Korean cinema, is certainly very adept at delivering biting political and social satire within the package of highly entertaining mass entertainment. While it’s not as electrifying as other hits like Parasite or Memories of Murder, the grimy world of the Niflheim expedition is certainly enjoyable. Situated in a future where religion, capitalism, and big-personality politicians have coalesced into a jumble of violence and tangled power dynamics, the film hardly bothers to be subtle about the future it warns of. What sort of future awaits us and all of the other citizens of this great cosmos? Will our capitalistic fanaticism be our downfall when we make it to the stars? Or, maybe, the job market is going to kill us all.
Mickey 17 is now playing in theatres.
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