Mickey 17

• Written, Produced, and Directed by Bong Joon Ho
• February 13, 2025 (Leicester Square) / February 28, 2025 (South Korea) / March 7, 2025 (US)
• Based on the 2022 novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton

A man joins a space colony expedition as a disposable worker that is cloned every time he dies.

This was a rough, long slog in so many ways. What I learned watch this was you can have an award-winning director, major actors along with a big budget and still produce junk. I am not against a movie with a message or a POV, but Mickey 17 does so with little to no subtlety or skill in an unfocused mess.

The expedition that Mickey (Robert Pattinson) is on is part of an expedition filled with red hat wearing fanatics of a particular individual but not the one you are probably thinking of right now. For whatever reason he decided to go into space and these caricatures decided to follow him.

Watching this I am left with the belief that Bong Joon Ho assumed a different outcome for the American presidential election. The character of Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) is clearly intended as a Trump stand in. The problem is it is a lazy impression done by an actor that since getting Marvel money has put in little to no effort. You should like watching the villain because something about them interests you and Ruffalo cannot generate that energy. Instead he has the vibe of a dad sleeping on the couch.

Marshall is a failed politician having lost two elections in a row who also runs a church or religious corporation or something. The movie never quite settles before forgetting the whole thing and just making him blindly stupid so the plot can happen.

Kenneth’s wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) adds nothing other than an obsession with sauces that never gets explained or a reason for hinted. She’s just more of Mark Ruffalo and his character. She would’ve been a better character to have being the shallow and slimy individual that Mark Ruffalo is supposed to be. Collette is just a better actress, and we don’t need two of the same thing in a movie.

The problem with the character of Mickey 17 is that he is just kind of pathetic. An unlikable pathetic character and not comedically so. Whatever terrible thing happens to him he probably deserves. Then there’s a voice Pattinson uses. I know he’s going for an American accent but it comes off as a bad Morty impression.

Like Mickey himself, all the characters are generally unlikable. ‘Unlikable’ can be good but you need to care about what happens to them. Those unlikable characters need to have something interesting about them. Those in Mickey 17 are unlikable in a way that you never care what happens to them. You just want your personal suffering viewing them to be over.

As a disposable worker every time Mickey dies he gets reprinted. His job is to do dangerous stuff and generally be studied-usually postmortem in some way. He is sent into dangerous situations because he is disposable. After one such situation where his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) pretty much left him for dead he is rescued by some local lifeforms and makes his way back to the ship only to find he has been duplicated and that’s when problems arise.

With two copies of the same individual both with apparently different personalities this just completely sidesteps the idea of what makes us who we are. Much like in Doctor Who, each new copy is different but beyond implying a kink for the girlfriend that has been dating each copy the movie never gets into anything else.

Mickey 17 should be the main character. When viewing he is closer to a supporting observer of events rather than a participate in events. Others take much more action to get things to happen than he does. Simply stumbling into things like he does is not taking action. Getting or waiting for direction from others is not taking action.

He starts as a bit of a listless loser and ends as a loser with a successful girlfriend. Mickey 17 doesn’t really change by the end of the movie. Nothing has truly improved for him. His girlfriend’s life has changed much more than his does by the epilogue scenes. She goes from being security for the expedition to being on the verge of the leader of the colony. Holy hopes for Kamala Harris!

The bigger question for me is: Why is Mickey still with Nasha (Naomi Ackie) by the end? I was left with the impression that she preferred the version of Mickey that was number 18 over the version that was Mickey 17. He had a stronger spine and was more sexually adventurous. Basically Mickey 17 the Plan B if Plan A didn’t work out which it didn’t. How sad of an individual do you have to be to be okay with being the second choice and knowing? Or is he just not smart enough to know it?

The jokes aren’t funny. The scenarios go on far too long. Mickey 17 is not witty enough to be satire. It’s not comedic enough to be a comedy. It’s not exciting enough to be an action film. It’s not thoughtful enough to be a thought-provoking work. The Sixth Day is deeper than this.

It is a superficial view of how the rich and powerful treat those below them on the social ladder. Never mind that the people behind this are among the rich and powerful and clearly have a down-the-nose view of those who are blue-collar or they see as poorly educated. Look at how they portray Mickey and ask yourself if they are truly any better than those they are intending to mock.

Mickey leaves Earth because he and his friend Timo are indebted to a loan shark over their failed cookie store. Is that supposed to be funny? This criminal finagles a person on the ship to get that money back. In Star Wars where everybody has their own personal ships and going from Point A to Point B is pretty easy that would work. There weren’t other options in this far-fetched scenario without such convenience?

I am curious how much of Mickey 17 was improvised or is Bong Joon Ho just not as good as Parasite would have us believe? The scenes go on and meander around. It’s like no one was actually in control beyond saying this is what I want to happen. There is no real script writer but just a scenario writer. Things feel directionless and unfocused. For example what was the point or purpose of Ylfa’s obsession with sauces?

When things finally start to happen it’s hard to take events seriously or simply care. The film has so undermined itself with unlikable characters and the most superficial analyses of what concepts it attempts to analyze that you kind of greet it all with a shrug. The CGI alien creatures are more interesting to look at than the events they are involved in.

Like so much else in this movie the epilogue went on far too long. We got a dream sequence of Mickey confronting Ylfa and Kenneth (sorta) which really wasn’t necessary since at least in some respects he had confronted them already. Who needed to know about the disposition of his friend Timo or a (further) wrap up of the storyline with the loan shark that put a lot of effort and resources into what one can imagine is a comparatively small debt? Did we not get enough to draw conclusions beforehand?

I’m a big fan of economy of storytelling and this never once engages in any of that. Everything just drags. Twenty minutes of this movie feels far longer than that. I say that having paused the film at around the 20-minute mark with very little developed and thinking the story had gone on much longer than it actually did.

Mickey 17 is a long slog of a film that promised so much and delivers on nothing. It’s not smart satire or witty comedy or thought-provoking science fiction. It cannot even get exciting during an action scene. When it does try to delve into something it delves into it so poorly that you ask why are they even trying? Watch something with more character development like The SixthDay or Commando. Just don’t waste your time on this.