Mickey 17 Review

dir by Bong Joon Ho

Bong Joon Ho is at it again, and he doesn’t disappoint with his never-missing-an-opportunity poignant and sweeping satirical style that he delivered with the likes of his previous film, Parasite (2019), the first foreign film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Mickey 17 is an adaptation of the science fiction novel Mickey7 (seven, not seventeen) published in 2022 by Edward Ashton.

Greek mythology lingers in the background of the narrative; the specific myth being Zeus’s punishment to Prometheus for stealing fire to give back to mankind. In the myth, as a consequence of his actions, Prometheus was chained to a rock where an eagle would eat his liver every day, only for it to regrow overnight, hence his condemnation to eternal punishment. In Joon Ho’s film, the main protagonist Mickey (played by Robert Pattinson), is an “Expendable,” or a disposable worker whose memory and body gets cloned every time he dies for research; the number that follows his name designates the number of times he has died and then been reprinted with a human printing technology. There are few expendables on the mission, as it is not the job most people wanted to sign up for when leaving earth, and the tests which the expendables perform for the rest of the crew are harsh, to say the least. At one point of the film, Mickey is sent out to space to test the potential of a lethal virus in the air. The virus ends up killing him.

Mickey is far more tragic than Prometheus was because, unlike Prometheus, Mickey does not set out to do anything heroic. In addition, he is ignorant of the implications his application to and participation in the Colony Expedition bear – he is merely trying to escape the terrible conditions on earth – and furthermore, when he applies to be an “Expendable” on the mission, he forgets to read the fine print of the job description and doesn’t even know what he has signed himself up for. Mickey’s ignorance, and too his innocence, make him a sympathetic character. By imbuing the character with these qualities, Joon Ho exaggerates and exposes the abuse of the human printing technology on the expedition with a heightened perception.

I did not expect the film to be so gory. Not only is there a great deal of violence and bloodshed captured onscreen, but the living conditions of the people on the spacecraft are extremely severe, almost like a concentration camp. For instance, the cafeteria food looks inedible. The crew’s every calorie and energy consumption are precisely measured so as not to waste precious resources. These militaristic conditions on overdrive are a fine example of the director assaying the scope of the satire he applies.

There is a love story at play in the film between Mickey and a fellow agent Nasha (played by Naomi Ackie) that warms up what are otherwise frigid (literally, and metaphorically speaking) and dystopian circumstances. It is their love that sustains a thread of humaneness throughout the work. And if I am defining humaneness by qualities of kindness, mercy, and compassion, there is another through line of this aforesaid humaneness that persists in the movie, but interestingly, it is bestowed upon the crew by a radically alien, alien population called “The Creepers.” It is a great irony of Bong Joon Ho’s film that these Creepers, which are almost unfathomably and horrifying ugly by human standards of beauty (almost satanic looking as they evoke Blakean illustrations of hell), show more humanity to the crew of the Colony Expedition than even the crew demonstrates among themselves. The Creepers saving Mickey 17 at the start of the film from an ice cavern in outer space is ironically the event that sets the rest of the plot in motion and leads to the printing of Mickey 18, when the expedition members mistake Mickey 17 for dead.

The plot is stirred again when Nasha discovers Mickey’s multiple, and yet again when a supporting female character Kai (played by Anamaria Vartolomei) develops a crush on Mickey 17. This love square teases out some of the nuances that the concept of human cloning brings to bear on interpersonal relationships: Nasha conceptualizes the two versions of Mickey as the same man, but Kai interprets that the men are different. And if pleasure for its own sake is worth mentioning, there was also just something satisfying about watching the drama of two beautiful women vie for the same man; I feel like it is usually the other way around. It is hard to distinguish characteristic differences between Mickey 17 and Mickey 18, but the director does draw out that Mickey 18 is the more aggressive and less sensitive of the two. As viewers, we can discern this from Mickey 18’s repeated insults directed towards Mickey 17 concerning his weakness in dealing with the authorities on the mission, like Marshall (played by Mark Ruffalo) the villanous leader of the expedition. It is hard to tell in the film, though, whether this is an effort to imbue Mickey 18’s character with more courage or simply more brutality and less humanity. I did not read the novel that Joon Ho adapted the film from, but it would be interesting to see how the writer, Edward Ashton, distinguished the two versions of Mickey in the book.

The film operates on an epic scale, which includes its music score and cinematography. Joon Ho successfully executes an adaptation of a dystopian work of science fiction replete with tongue-in-cheek humor and parodic demonstrations of many aspects of the contemporary geopolitical tenor, including a mockery of authoritarian regimes. The evil leader of the expedition, who served as a former American politician on earth, might remind one of contemporary media depictions of Putin, especially in the scenes when he is filmed outside of the spacecraft amidst a landscape that resembles the Russian tundra. White supremacy and colonialism aside, the film has a happy ending, and the humans on the Colony Expedition manage to overcome the threats of the nefarious human printing technology, which by the way, a brief flashback describes as having been invented on earth by a psychopath to enable him to commit sophisticated murders. Much like Parasite, which leaves the fate of the underdog ambiguous, it is hard to say what will come next for the crew of the Colony Expedition in Mickey 17, but at the least, it is promising that the human printing technology was banned on earth in the film.

Links to Explore:

1. Mickey7, novel by Edward Ashton

   https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250275035/mickey7/