“Imagine there’s an unknown virus in the air and you’re inhaling it with every breath.”
Mickey 17 is a pitch-black comedy. Based on Edward Ashton’s 2022 science fiction novel, Mickey 7, Oscar-award-winning visionary Bong Joon Ho is telling a story as old as time about greed and hope that is also a caustic social commentary on current events. At its heart, Mickey 17 is a critique of cult-like political movements, fascist eugenics, late-order capitalism, and the exploitation of disposable labor, i.e., people, while also attempting a thoughtful, introspective conversation about the meaning of mortality, the soul, and the nature of death. At times wistful and poetic, occasionally brutal and sad, the grim farce jolts with crackling slapstick laughs. Subversive, political, and suffused with dark humor, the nonlinear Mickey 17 is the bizarre mashup baby of the 1967 Star Trek episode, The Devil in the Dark and Duncan Jones’ 2009 film, Moon.
Mickey 17 is a 2025 Warner Brothers picture directed by Bong Joon Ho from a collaborative story with Edward Ashton. Robert Pattinson stars alongside Naomi Ackie, Anamaria Vartolomei, and Steven Yeun with Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo.
“They’re going to print you out tomorrow. Mickey, what does it feel like to die?”
It’s 2054. Mickey Barnes (Pattinson)is an inconsequential fuckup of cosmic proportions. He and his best friend, small-time hood Timo (Yeun), have gotten on the wrong side of the loan shark Darius Blank, and they are graphically shown that there is no place on the planet they can go to escape. Deep in debt and fleeing a failing and broken Earth, they’re able to find passage on a colonizing expedition to the ice planet Niflheim led by the degenerate politician Kenneth Marshall (Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Collette). Timo’s talents as a Flitter pilot are in high demand, but bereft of any useful skills, Barnes volunteers to be the flight’s Expendable.
Developed by the mad scientist Alan Manikova, the memory-capture and human printing technology that makes Expendables possible is very illegal on Earth, but each outward-bound colony craft is set up with a printing rig and allowed one. At the moment of an Expendable’s death, a new iteration is cranked out with a backed-up consciousness. The scientists on Mickey’s flight callously use him to determine Space safety parameters regarding radiation exposure and temperature extremes and when they arrive on Niflheim, several Mickeys die savagely before the scientists can adapt him to the hazardous atmosphere, allowing for the inoculations of the others and the onset of colonization. The only solace he finds is in the arms of the kindly and irreverent security guard, Nasha (Ackie), who begins a relationship with Mickey early on in the four-year transit.
Marshall and his wife live in luxury, eating like royals while the crew and compliment of the colony ship swallow slop. His dreams of a racist regime are Ylfa’s as she not-so-subtly pulls Kenneth’s strings and plants ideas in his empty head. Unfortunately for their ambitions, Niflheim isn’t an uninhabited world. The frigid, icebound plateau is honeycombed with tunnels made by the indigenous species, multilimbed animals that look like hairy octopus-buffalo hybrids who are named the Creepers. Mickey 17 is sent out to capture one and return it to the labs for testing. Things don’t go as planned. The ice beneath him spiderwebs then shatters, and Mickey plunges into a crevasse. Timo can’t reach him with his grapple and abandons Mickey to freeze after making sure he has no hard feelings.
Mickey makes it out of the trench, his thoughts of Nasha giving him the determination to drive his feet forward through the frigid waste. Half-blinded by a side-blown snow blizzard, he’s able to catch up to a ground vehicle carrying a large geological sample and hitch a ride back to the compound. He wants a hot meal. He wants a warm bed. He wants Nasha. Opening the door to their room, he collapses on a pile of blankets. The blankets shift, and he looks into the confused, mirrored eyes of Mickey 18. 17 panics. There aren’t supposed to be two of them at a time! That’s the first rule, and somehow, he’s broken it.
More than an Expendable now, he’s a Multiple, and now marked not just for death but also permanent deletion.
Can Mickey 17 come to an arrangement with 18? Can they keep their existence secret? Will Nasha help them hide from the system? What is Marshall and Ylfa’s true plan for the inhabitants of Niflheim, both new and old? What’s Timo’s angle? Will the friends be able to escape paying off their arrears to Darius Blank, or will the pair’s unseemly past catch up to them when they least expect? Please watch Mickey 17 to find out.
“You don’t look like you’ve been printed out. You look like a person.”
Niflheim is one of the worlds in the Norse cosmology, a grim ice realm of death ruled over by Hel, daughter of Loki. Bong runs with this. He effectively paints with a limited palette, getting emotional resonance from the empty blackness of space, the bleak, snow-blown glaciers of the ice planet and the varied grey and muted rust tones of the expeditionary carrier, using a modicum of blood judiciously colorflashed across the film at strategic points to keep the viewer’s attention. The use of subdued shades contrasts with the lavish and saturated tones of the Marshall’s luxurious chambers, hitting home the capitalist critique of the “haves” having more than they’ll ever need while the untermenschen go wanting.
A lot of the film skates so close to the surface of satire that there are cracks: The colonizing Leader Marshall gets nicked in the cheek by an assassin’s bullet while bloviating. His red-hat supporters have a one-fingered outstretched salute that hits too close to home. In his spare time, he broadcasts a televanegelist hour to his captive audience in the compound. He is obsessed with building a new world to eclipse the old. He boasts that “We will launch the greatest sex-encouragement scheme in history! Niflheim will be our pure white planet, full of superior people!” He’s also a cruel and preposterous, boisterous, incredible moron of infinite proportions. The brain behind the operations is the scheming Ylfa in a scenery-chewing role that Toni Collette seems to relish.
Secondary characters are largely cardboard cutouts, though Ackie and Vartolomei gamely work with what little they are given. Nasha is determined to march to her own drummer while Vartolomei gives her character, Kai, a steel backbone when faced with the Marshalls’ true nature and blooms with warm empathy for Mickey when she perceives what a trap being an Expendable is. Even Pattinson’s various Mickeys are painted with broad strokes; of the versions that get any characterization, there’s a meek one, a silly one and an angrily assertive one.
Parts of the movie seem missing. There’s a lot of inexplicable things going on with Timo happening off-screen. A subplot with him as a drug-dealing kingpin pops out of nowhere and rings hollow. Marshall’s followers are largely props who disappear once the story gets going. The film focuses almost entirely on the Mickeys, the science team, the security crew, and the Marshalls as well as the hordes of Creepers. As the Creepers mass, the CG gets a little wonky. There is a stampede across the snow-packed surface that doesn’t sit well or feel right.
After establishing Mickey’s virtual immortality and playing it for laughs, Ho cleverly restores dramatic tension by introducing multiples and providing the threat of true death in the form of the menace to Mickey’s backup hard drive Brick. Moral problems with exploitation are pursued by the picture and magnified to absurdity with the Mickey’s dispensable nature. To this reviewer, the most striking of the ethical dilemmas displayed in Mickey 17 is this: All the characters treat the Mickeys like they’re one person when it’s pretty obvious that none of the copies are the same Mickey. Everyone just treats them that way. Even when there is a radical difference in temperament on display, other characters treat these discrepancies as sides of a coin. The Mickeys in Mickey 17 are the Ship of Theseus paradox done on fast-forward. If a ship is replaced, part by part, piece by piece over the years, is it the same ship? That question is elided over in franchises like Star Trek with the regular use of their transporter technology but is put front and center by Mickey 17 and the human printing of Expendables.
Thought-provoking, melancholy, bleak, bitterly funny, and bursting with optimism for tomorrow in the final reel, the disjointed narrative of Mickey 17 makes for a fascinating, ambitious film. Bong Joon Ho, the director of 2013’s Snowpiercer and 2019’s Parasite, has made a derivative, predictable movie that manages to be an engrossing, quality piece of work that can stand on its own.
Mickey 17 is in theatres 3/7/2025.
Brian Isaacs - Executive Editor / Publisher 
Anthony Andujar Jr.