Mickey 17 (2025)
dir. Bong Joon Ho
Rated: R
image: ©2025 Warner Bros. Pictures
If there were any doubts left that Bong Joon Ho is the world’s foremost fantastical chronicler of how class continues to hold the human species back from the best version of itself, Mickey 17 should put them to rest. Like Parasite and Snowpiercer before it, Bong’s wackiest sci-fi adventure to date focuses on people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
Mickey and his friend, Timo, are desperate to get off of planet Earth. The year is 2050, and egomaniacal charlatans and loan sharks are still running the show. (Bong’s vision of the future in Mickey 17 is deeply rooted in our catastrophic present.) When Timo’s surefire get-rich-quick-scheme to ride a macaron craze goes bust, the pair have two options: die in excruciating pain at the end of a chainsaw, or join up with failed politician Kenneth Marshall’s expedition to colonize the ice-planet Niflheim.
In a nod to the obscene wealth of today’s billionaires – who treat the world economy as their own personal game of “I’m the best” – it’s made clear that Darius Blank, the loan shark, doesn’t really need his money back from Mickey and Timo. Blank’s muscle explains to the pair that his morbidly rich boss has more money than he could ever possibly spend. He uses the defaulted loans as an excuse to pursue his real passion, experiencing the delinquent borrower’s brutally painful death via that chainsaw.
(As a benefit of Bong’s delightfully off-kilter sense of humor, we get several good looks at the twin-bladed chainsaw, which is battery powered. Since humans have a hard time letting go of the past, this model comes equipped with a speaker that replicates the sound of the gas-powered version of the tool.)
Marshall might be a vainglorious, quasi-religious figure – whose speeches about his plans for the Niflheim colony inch closer and closer to describing some kind of authoritarian sex-cult – but he’s better than facing the chainsaw. So, the men sign up. As he studies the teeming masses of other down-on-their-luck people trying to get off-world, Mickey muses to us, “I guess everybody’s got money problems.” Timo, always looking out for himself, finagles his way into a shuttle pilot gig.
Mickey is not so lucky. With no skills to offer, he takes the only position available to him. He’s to become an “expendable.” Cloning technology – within the world of Mickey 17, an MRI-sized printer assembles new versions of each clone from recycled organic materials – has come so far that both the human body and mind can be scanned for later reproduction. Mickey’s mind is scanned at least once a week, to avoid any major gaps in his memory. When his current body dies, his backup mind is loaded into the new body and, voila, Mickey 1 leads to Mickey 2, and so on and so forth.
Earth has banned human reprinting, but, in an example of the hilarious hypocrisy that the worst of us will engage in to get what we want, Marshall lays reprinting technology at the feet of Satan himself while deftly creating a carveout for his galactic expedition. Under his plan, only one expendable will be allowed per expedition. That expendable will perform the most dangerous tasks on the ship.
Mickey essentially becomes a lab rat. If you’ve seen Bong’s previous films Okja or Parasite, you’ll be familiar with the writer-director’s pitch-black approach to comedy. That sensibility somehow makes the tortures that we witness Mickey endure palatable. Bong foregrounds the heartlessness of the science crew as they devise countless ways to test the effects of their environment on the human body.
For one mission, they ostensibly send Mickey out to replace equipment on the outside of the ship during their four-year journey. Upon his confusion at the damaged equipment already having been replaced, the scientists tell Mickey the real reason he has been sent is so that they can study the effects of massive amounts of cosmic radiation on his body. They want him to let them know at what point his skin starts to burn, when he loses his vision, and, ultimately, the “real nut we’re after,” how long it takes him to die.
When a passing bit of space rock cleanly rips Mickey’s hand from his body, the head science officer, Arkady, barely suppresses an excited gasp before musing to his coworkers, “Oh! Oh! Wow! Did you see that?!”
In an absolute casting coup, actor Cameron Britton portrays Arkady. Britton is probably best known for his disturbing turn as infamous serial killer Ed Kemper in Joe Penhall’s superb Netflix series Mindhunter. To see Britton’s performance as Kemper is to have it live within you. I thought more than once about how much Kemper would enjoy Arkady’s job of putting Mickey through one torturous death after the other.
Working stiffs often must lie to themselves (even if they don’t realize they’re doing it) about their perceived value within an organization. Mickey tells us, in his near-constant voice-over narration, that he “felt like [he] was part of the team.” We hear him say this as his new body almost crashes to the floor when coming out of the printer. His fellow “teammate” has forgotten to place the table, to catch Mickey’s body, at the end of the machine because he was looking at his phone.
The only joy Mickey has in his life comes from Nasha, a ship security officer. The two fall in love and find sanctuary in each other.
Things change for Mickey (17) when, during a routine scouting mission on Niflheim, he is assumed to have died after falling into an icy crevasse. More accurately, he’s left for dead when Timo drops down to an ice shelf immediately above where Mickey has fallen, in order to retrieve Mickey’s valuable flamethrower. It would be riskier to try and save Mickey, Timo reasons, and besides, they’ll just reprint him tomorrow anyway. After Timo becomes the latest person to callously ask Mickey the one question that only he can answer – “What’s it like to die?” – he leaves his so-called friend to his fate. Mickey soon spots a gargantuan alien species farther back in a cave, and assumes his death this time will involve being swallowed whole.
But the aliens don’t want him for a snack, because, Mickey assumes, his recycled meat tastes spoiled. These grunting aliens return him to the surface of the planet, and Mickey makes his way back to the landed ship, which has become this faction of humanity’s first, temporary home on the freezing ice-planet. When he crashes out on his bunk in his private quarters, Mickey 17 discovers that Mickey 18 has already been printed. The two clones are now what are considered “multiples,” which is a crime.
In another sardonically humorous jab at the kind of people our current society lifts up, we find out, in a flashback sequence, that the inventor of human printing technology was a “certified psychopath” who created multiples of himself in order to commit the most heinous crimes against unhoused people. As a result, multiple iterations of the same person are not allowed to exist. The punishment for multiples is execution and permanent deletion of their personality backup.
There’s so much going on in Bong’s overstuffed screenplay that one of the most tantalizing concepts in Mickey 17 isn’t given the full examination that it deserves. Mickey 18 is qualitatively different from our beloved 17, and that’s due to something that the movie never names, yet we feel intuitively. It’s the idea of replicative drift. The only reason I have a name for it is because I’m a fan of author Dennis E. Taylor’s hard sci-fi Bobiverse series of books.
In the imagined world of the Bobiverse books, one man (I’m sure you can guess his name), begets hundreds of copies of himself and the farther away from the original version each successive copy gets, the more distinct personality traits emerge.
While Mickey 17 nods in the direction of this idea – 17 gives us a rundown of Nasha’s take on each of the Mickey’s personality quirks – the movie never satisfyingly explores the idea. That’s not to suggest it’s ignored. Much of the conflict of the picture’s middle third hinges on how different 18 is from his still living predecessor.
Each performance within the movie is of a piece with Bong Joon Ho’s bonkers and maximalist approach. Robert Pattinson, as the Mickeys, carves out a distinct personality for each of his iterations. The subtle (and not so subtle) shadings that the actor brings to differentiate 17 from 18 make for two totally unique performances. What Pattinson is doing here is on par with the even more nuanced – only because of the very different tones of the two movies – work of Michael B. Jordan as twins Smoke and Stack in this year’s phenomenal Sinners.
A still from Mickey 17.
Mark Ruffalo makes a meal-and-a-half out of his portrayal of egomaniacal Kenneth Marshall. The aspiring dictator, whose only animating force is his own aggrandizement, isn’t exactly Donald Trump, but Ruffalo clearly used him as inspiration. In one fleeting moment, with Marshall at the edge of the frame, Ruffalo goes into a riff on Trump’s ridiculous little dance moves.
I’m late to the Naomi Ackie party – the English actor’s biggest role to date is her turn as Whitney Houston in the 2022 biopic I Wanna Dance with Somebody – but better late than never. As Nasha, Mickey’s only source of solace on the ship, Ackie brings a sense of instability to the character. Her Nasha is wild-eyed and always looking for a good time. This is exemplified in her drug-fueled fantasies about what she can get up to in bed with two Mickeys at her disposal.
The great Toni Collette gives Ruffalo a run for his money as the conniving Ylfa Marshall, Kenneth’s Lady Macbeth, who whispers in her husband’s ear to gently steer the madman’s actions. Ylfa’s unhinged reverence for sauces – she can’t wait to exploit the alien creatures on Niflheim for her culinary aspirations – is rivaled only by her lust for power.
Steven Yeun excels at playing a selfish dick – the ultimate example of this is his turn in the Netflix limited series Beef – which is exactly what’s required to play Mickey’s putative friend Timo.
Mickey 17 is Bong Joon Ho in maximalist sci-fi mode in the mold of his previous efforts Okja and Snowpiercer. It lacks the restraint of his 2019 Oscar Best Picture winner Parasite, but the social critique, while padded with bonkers story turns and a wacky futuristic premise, is every bit as incendiary.
Why it got 4 stars:
- It might be a little frenetic and overstuffed, but Mickey 17 is Bong Joon Ho using an outlandish sci-fi premise to explore class dynamics and how our society values (or doesn’t) its members of lowest rank.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I didn’t mention him in the main review, but shoutout to Daniel Henshall as Preston, Marshall's personal assistant. The obsequiousness Henshall’s Preston displays for his master is never a focus of the movie, but it’s wonderfully realized. During one of Marshall’s more Trumpian moments of speechifying, Preston encourages his boss to continue. Marshall responds by asking, “You want more of that,” to which Preston subserviently replys, “Please.” It’s a fleeting moment, but one of Mickey 17’s funniest.
- Macarons are not a sin!
- The Wilhelm Scream lives on!
- One line of dialog, “How many times I gotta tell ya?”, hints at how we talk to ourselves, and that becoming a new person often hinges on changing the stories we tell ourselves about what makes us who we are.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I missed Mickey 17 in the theater, but I caught it at home on the couch via HBO Max.
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