Mickey 17

Mickey 17 is certainly a unique science fiction film that ineffectively combines satire, absurdity, overcooked ideas, and some one-dimensional performances, and its end result is a monotonous slugfest. More frequently we get excruciating tonal shifts and very irritating caricatures with eye-rolling performances from some of the cast, especially big hitters who I often embrace, like Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette, who feel like they just walked off a cartoon. While this normally isn’t an issue as the film’s Oscar-winning writer and director Bong Joon-Ho, who has a long tradition of creating highly respected genre movies that often lampoon the wealthy, warn of geological collapse and have tonal shifts of dark humor with a touch of humanism. These elements are found again in his long-awaited follow-up to his 2019 masterpiece Parasite. However, this time around it feels like Bong Joon-Ho is a faded rock show, attempting to do the same routine from years ago, and the result this time around feels rusty, and it doesn’t feel as exciting or refreshing this time around.

Bong Joon-Ho has combined element Snowpiercer and Okja with his futuristic setting and completed a film with promise; it just suffers from some severe repetition and a bland third act that feels oversaturated with ideas, and it has some insufferable pacing issues in the edit. It’s no surprise that its lead, Robert Pattinson, does his best with the material, and you can tell he gives it his all. About an expendable employee for a corporation that sets his spaceship and mission where he has iterations that allow him to come back from the dead each time, he dies on the colonel’s’s space mission. In the narrative, we see his 17th iteration fall into a mountain that he can’t be rescued from by his crew members, leaving him to die. He ends up bringing protected by an alien critter referred to as “creepers,” which seem dangerous at first but rather become peaceful. They end up rescuing him out of the ice mountain, and they get him back on his spaceship.

Courtesy Warner Bros.

We also get some backstory on Mickey, a broke loser in the future who doesn’t have a job or career and who finds himself in trouble with gangsters. With nowhere to hide and his life in jeopardy, he passes himself off as an “expendable” to a corporate mission led by Kenneth Marshall (Ruffalo), an egomaniacal politician and CEO whose mission is to take a small group of scientists, researchers, and other expendables to Niflheim to colonize a new planet. We see his cult-like supporters wear red hats and have no critical thinking skills. It’s clearly a satirical jab at Donald Trump and his supporters; it just feels too on the nose and not particularly clever or refreshing.

Joon-Ho shows how Mickey dies routinely, how he wakes up from each day to a new body. His job is literally disposable and only serves the oligarchs; the other expendables are confined, and they are treated like prisoners, much like the concept in Snowpiercer. We are introduced to a security agent on the ship named Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who ends up becoming Mickey’s sex partner and eventually love interest. Ackie has an equal role here, and her character ends up becoming just as heroic as Mickey. Situations go awry once another Mickey 18 appears, who is certainly more of the evil “Doppelganger” version of Mickey who attempts to murder Mickey 17, but 17 is spared by other fellow guards just in time. Together, through Nasha and another security agent named Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei), they build an alliance that can eventually liberate everyone from the ship from Kenneth Marshall and his equally devious wife Ylfa ({Toni Collette) control and domination. The 18th Mickey doesn’t really have a catch or serve to match up with a purpose other than showing two different variances and to open up two love stories. We have other characters, such as Steven Yeun as Timo, one of the crew’s pilots, and he is a childhood friend who got Mickey into this mess.

Courtesy Warner Bros.

The scenario is based on a 2022 novel of the same name by Edward Ashton, and this now marks Bong Joon Ho’s third feature in English (the other two being Snowpiercer and Okja), and Bong Joon Ho also adapted the screenplay. Ruffalo appears to be reusing the leftover dentures from Tilda Swinton’s villain in Snowpiercer, and the performance is far less effective and even more cartoonish. Bong heads will likely forgive the film’s many shortcomings and various pacing issues in the chronology, including a lousy third act that feels tedious. Though it includes some action and some well-staged suspense, by the time we got to that, it’s easy to just easily check out.

Emphasis on the environmental impacts and the possibilities of space pioneering to inhabit a new planet remain the most thoughtful, such as Mickey dying over and over from viruses of the planet to develop a vaccine, remaining the most interesting, but when it gets to the whole oligarchy satire, the execution and material feels like it belongs in Adam McKay’s equally overcooked and uneventful Don’t Look Up. Indeed, it’s encouraging to see a mainstream film directed by a talented visionary like Bong Joon-ho that filled with an interesting concept over redundant sequels and reboots, but Mickey 17 doesn’t quite achieve the artistry it aims for. I was initially frustrated when the release date for Mickey 17 kept getting pushed back, especially being robbed of being awards season contender late last year, but now I understand why. It could have easily been pushed back a few more months to clean up more of the edit.

MICKEY 17 is now playing in theaters everywhere