The nearly six years between Parasite and Mickey 17 is the longest release gap of Bong Joon-ho’s career. It would’ve been shorter if not for a series of delays ultimately totalling about a year, which initially saw it pushed from late March 2024 to January 2025 – an infamous spot on the movie release calendar, post-Oscars eligibility, where studios often dump projects they have little confidence in. The film community was bewildered. Bong’s Best Picture follow-up, a January release? What was Warner Bros. thinking?
The optics have since been salvaged: a return to March, and a Berlin premiere that allowed the press to render judgment early, a sign of confidence. After initial reports suggested some editing room disagreement between filmmaker and studio (with final cut contractually Bong’s), the release date dance for a film shot in 2022 and meant for 2024 has been attributed to the Hollywood strikes of 2023. I don’t know if I buy that. I’m sure someday, when it can no longer sour the marketing campaign, we’ll learn the full story.
But WB needn’t have made us worry. Mickey 17 is great. As satirical, darkly comic sci-fi, it’s most similar to his 2017 film Okja, though it doesn’t pursue the same emotional extremes, either in terms of heart or horror. It’s a story about how one man’s existence was turned into a (very funny) cosmic joke by technology that effectively makes him immortal, and therefore endlessly disposable. And, over time, it becomes about how this man internalized the disposability put upon him by this system and whether he can learn to overcome it.
Mickey 17’s Sci-Fi Premise Is Used To Tell A Layered Story
Robert Pattinson’s Protagonist Isn’t The Sole Focal Point
Mickey 17 is named for, and narrated by, the seventeenth iteration of Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson). After his childhood friend Timo (Steven Yeun) gets them both into debt with a loan shark who likes to watch his debtors die horrifically, Mickey seeks a spot on a space colonization mission to the planet Niflheim, led by failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and heavily crewed by his cult-like devotees. Timo makes use of his new pilot’s license to secure a spot, but Mickey stands out by being the only applicant to the position of Expendable.
Ethical, philosophical, legal, and religious concerns have made this tech illegal on Earth, but space is a grey area…
Mickey’s body is scanned and saved, his consciousness and memories stored. Each time he dies, his body is reprinted by a machine, his last brain-save uploaded, and voilà, Mickey lives anew. I knew Bong’s film was for me from the first time we see a reprinting, and Pattinson’s semi-protruding body is pulled back a couple clicks with the jerky crudeness of your at-home printer retracting a piece of paper. This process is sometimes overseen by a young scientist more interested in his video games, and when he’s particularly distracted, new-Mickey is allowed to hit the floor with a fleshy thud.
Ethical, philosophical, legal, and religious concerns have made this tech illegal on Earth, but space is a gray area, and an Expendable is ideal for high-risk testing. For example, in a darkly hilarious montage, Mickey 17 recounts how several previous Mickeys died to synthesize a vaccine for a lethal pathogen discovered on Niflheim’s surface. He derives a fragile sense of purpose from these sacrifices, as well as his relationship with the security agent Nasha (Naomi Ackie), whose romance with him has transcended his many iterations.
As Mickey 17‘s story progresses, its web of interests grows. Mickey is sent to recover a specimen of Niflheim’s native creature, dubbed the Creeper, which looks like a Lovecraftian pill bug and ranges in size from small dog to wooly mammoth. When he falls down a crevice and is swarmed, he’s assumed dead, but the aliens actually cast him back out into the snow. Seventeen returns to the ship to discover he’s been reprinted, resulting in the dreaded Multiples. If the authorities find out, he and 18 will both be killed and Mickey’s data permanently deleted.
Bong’s movies are always notable for their specificity, and there are little details spread throughout that contribute to an impish sense of humor.
Bong manages to string together many satirical targets across the movie’s runtime, and untangling them all would take more space than I have here. Ruffalo’s politician and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) recall the cartoonish evil of Snowpiercer‘s villains, and their heightened performances are the source of much of Mickey 17‘s weirdness. They both worked for me, especially as the film goes on; Poor Things seems to have unlocked a certain comic abandon in Ruffalo that I hope he continues to explore.
The ship’s society, experienced through Mickey’s place in it, skewers corporate work culture – the Science team discusses the bodily horrors headed Mickey’s way like they’re on an everyday conference call. The Creepers’ role in the movie is what recalls Okja most directly. As their relationship to the human settlers is dramatized, Mickey 17‘s satire gets increasingly bitter, and the laughs fade.
Robert Pattinson’s Dual Performance Isn’t Just Hilarious
It’s The Source Of Mickey 17’s Most Powerful Theme
Before that, though, I laughed often. Bong’s movies are always notable for their specificity, and there are little details spread throughout that contribute to an impish sense of humor. Pattinson proves to be this sensibility’s perfect avatar. He is truly excellent in this film, especially as the title character, an intriguing spin on Bong’s lovable losers often played by Song Kang-ho. It’s this more comedic of his performances that leaves the biggest impression.
Related
Parasite Review: Bong Joon-ho’s Latest is Truly One of a Kind
Funny, disturbing, and heartbreaking all at once, Parasite finds Bong in top form as a storyteller, delivering a film like no other this year.
Mickey 18 is strikingly different: confident, self-assured, quick to anger, and comfortable with violence. Their contrast (not uncommon in reprints, as it turns out) is, for me, the source of Mickey 17‘s most fruitful tension.
Bong has crafted a large-scale genre film that, for all its oddness, goes down pretty easy. Philosophical conundrums are neatly packaged and left that way. The tone modulates, but it lacks the sharp, gut-punch shifts that characterize much of his previous work. You could easily take in its flashier satire without reflecting on how it builds a case for the singular dignity of human life, with the exchanges between Mickeys 17 and 18 as the fulcrum.
For all its ideas, what struck me as the true purpose of Mickey 17 is its exploration of how an exploitative society pushes a message of worthlessness on its workers, and how the simplest, most powerful act of resistance is not to believe it. Look back on the movie after you’ve finished it and you’ll find evidence of that thematic engine in practically every scene. That exquisite balance of art and entertainment is exactly what makes each Bong Joon-ho film a gift to be savored – here’s hoping his next one doesn’t take quite so long to reach us.
Mickey 17
8/10
- Release Date
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March 25, 2025
- Robert Pattinson’s dual performance is excellent
- The film’s themes are layered
- The story balances humor and drama