Poor, poor Mickey Barnes. The protagonist of the movie Mickey 17 lives a grim existence as an “expendable,” a employee aboard a spaceship whose solely job is to die repeatedly for the sake of human progress. Mickey, performed by Robert Pattinson, is subjected to deadly viruses, uncovered to radiation, and requested to sit down in a chamber of nerve fuel, simply so he can report on his personal deterioration till he loses consciousness. Typically, he’s not even useless after they toss his physique into the incinerator that melts him into natural goop—goop that’s then fed again into the MRI-like machine that may print a brand new copy of him, so he can undergo all of that once more.
But if Mickey’s life is suffocatingly bleak, Mickey 17 is something however. Relatively, it’s a wacky, satisfyingly unusual romp that additional reaffirms Bong Joon Ho as a singular filmmaker. The director isn’t the type to inform a one-note sci-fi story; his earlier style efforts, reminiscent of 2013’s Snowpiercer and 2017’s Okja, work properly due to their elasticity, juggling the comedic with the macabre, the absurd with the intense. Based mostly on a novel by Edward Ashton referred to as Mickey7, Bong’s adaptation is his first main Hollywood studio venture and his costliest film thus far, budgeted at practically $120 million.
The worth tag exhibits: The world constructing is intensive, involving large-scale units and spectacular visible results, and the forged options superstars and character actors alike. But Mickey 17 feels intimate on the similar time; it fastidiously research a protagonist whose morality transcends his bodily being. That such sentimentality can come throughout in a narrative as disturbing as Mickey’s could sound illogical. However, as Bong informed my colleague David Sims in 2019, “I all the time really feel it’s extra enjoyable when I attempt to persuade the viewers of one thing that doesn’t make sense.”
Not a lot of Mickey 17 is smart at first blush. Set within the yr 2054, the movie takes place largely on an icy planet referred to as Niflheim, the place a fascist politician named Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, doing absolutely the most) and his equally outrageous spouse, Ylfa (Toni Collette), have landed in hopes of building a colony. Niflheim, although, appears uninhabitable, so the couple, their supporters, and their workers—a few of whom are petty criminals fleeing Earth—stay aboard their docked ship, turning it right into a compound. Mickey is the crew’s guinea pig; after entering into bother with a mortgage shark, he signed as much as be expendable with a purpose to escape sure demise. (That he utilized for a task requiring him to die anyway is especially as a result of he did not learn the job’s phrases and situations. Once more: poor, poor Mickey Barnes.)
The Marshalls deal with Mickey like trash, even though he’s the only one that may also help advance science and eventually set up their settlement. The movie begins with the seventeenth copy of Mickey doing what he’s come to consider he does greatest—that’s, dying—earlier than hopscotching between the previous and current to inform a deeper story: that of a bunch of people that assume they’ve made a clear break from their pasts, solely to find how tough reaching contemporary begins may be. Amid all of it, Mickey perishes time and again, till an accident causes two Mickeys to be alive without delay.
This plot level permits Bong to slyly underline the best way people can repeat themselves. Many scenes echo earlier ones: Every Mickey falls for a girl named Nasha (Naomi Ackie), and every Mickey tends to passively settle for his destiny. The slimy ne’er-do-well Timo (Steven Yeun), who roped Mickey into the loan-shark snafu and had the identical concept to run away into house, can’t cease making under-the-table offers. The Marshalls intend to make Niflheim what they name a “planet of purity,” the place they will freely implement eugenic insurance policies. However their expedition is stuffed with already disgruntled employees; the identical grievances they’d again dwelling are seeping into the ship’s confines.
Bong has circled related themes in his different work, and any fan of the director’s movies will acknowledge the shared DNA. Mickey 17’s examination of the cruelty of social stratification instantly brings to thoughts the Oscar-winning Parasite, whereas its depiction of the sexualized perversity of upper-class extra has hints of Snowpiercer. A subplot involving Niflheim’s indigenous creatures—roly-poly-like critters the Marshalls dub “creepers”—highlights the significance of environmental preservation, which made me consider Okja, Bong’s fable about manufacturing facility farming. Mickey may as properly be a human model of that movie’s porcine titular character, a prized possession and a genetic marvel held captive by over-the-top totems of greed.
Bong proves to be exact as ever, although, which retains the film feeling distinct from his others. In Mickey 17, he creates photographs which might be immediately memorable: Throughout one among Mickey’s deaths, his physique slams towards a car’s airbag in gradual movement, glass shattering round his head. Throughout one other, his hand will get lower off and spins via outer house previous one of many ship’s home windows, droplets of blood trickling behind it. Once in a while, a contemporary Mickey slips out of the regeneration machine and tumbles slickly onto the ground like a fleshy alien. A few of the extra jarring sequences stay amusing regardless of their brashness: At one level, for instance, Mickey narrates a surprising vignette—a few psychopath on Earth who printed a number of copies of himself to hold out grisly murders—with the resigned, cautious tone of an workplace employee. That deliberate depth retains Mickey 17 participating even because it swerves (typically messily) into its plentiful twists.
The movie’s biggest asset, although, could also be Pattinson. The actor’s delightfully offbeat efficiency anchors the story in an endearing humanity. His decisions border on cartoonish—just like the nasally, quivering voice he provides Mickey—however they’re particular sufficient to make his character’s plight really feel recognizable. Mickey is the important thing to the expedition’s success and the dweeb subsequent door—he additionally embodies the paradox on the middle of the movie: that quests for “purity” are fools’ errands, cosmic jokes that yield solely extra flaws, conflicts, and issues. People could ceaselessly search self-preservation and perfection at any value, Mickey 17 suggests, however what makes individuals human isn’t their physique. It’s their soul.
