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MICKEY 17
Director: Bong Joon Ho Cast: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Steven Yeun, Anamaria Vartolomei, Cameron Britton, Patsy Ferran, Holliday Grainger MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 2:17 Release Date: 3/7/25 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 6, 2025 The premise of Mickey 17 opens up a world of philosophical and ethical questions about death, what it means to live, and how assorted systems only see life as a means to various superficial ends. After a certain point, writer/director Bong Joon Ho drops all of that to give us an increasingly wacky comedy and a plot that ultimately has little to do with the very setup the story has established. That setup, though, is enticing, as we meet poor Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), who's a man—or, more accurately, a series of men—destined to die and be re-born over and over again. Upon his introduction, Mickey is on his 17th iteration and stuck in an underground cavern on a frozen planet on the edge of the galaxy—surely about to die yet again within the mouth of one of the planet's native creatures. The story is set less than 30 years into the future, and while the advances in technology on display here likely are generously imagined, the vision of Earth as basically uninhabitable, while humanity does all it can to escape the environmental devastation, is certainly believable enough. The lengthy prologue shows the movie, based on Edward Ashton's novel Mickey 7, at its cleverest, most imaginative, and most wickedly funny. Trying to get away from a sociopathic gangster they owe money to, Mickey and his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) sign up for a migration to that faraway planet. While the pal got his pilot's license, Mickey has no relevant skills or education for such a mission, so to ensure that he can board the massive spacecraft heading to the other world, he volunteers to become an "expendable"—without actually reading the job description. Basically, he has agreed to become a human guinea pig for the crew's science team. They put him into space, in order to test the effects of radiation on his body and mind. They test a nerve gas on him, and upon landing on the planet Nilfheim, they send him outside, tell him to take off his helmet and take deep breaths, and eventually develop a vaccine for the assorted toxins and viruses in the air that kill several versions of Mickey. The twisted humor of Mickey's multiple deaths, with his corpses recycled with other organic "waste" to create the new iterations, is genuinely funny, especially because of the satirical edge of Bong's world building. All of this is theoretically fine, because Mickey' DNA and memories are stored on a hard drive. After every death, the scientists just reprint a new Mickey, who somehow remembers every death, despite the fact that the logistics of this process mean his new versions would have no memory of dying. If the movie actually followed through on the existential conundrum and terror of Mickey's situation, we might accept that little hole in the logic here. Since Bong's script has many, many other and sometimes unrelated things in mind, though, he sidesteps any real examination of that logic. Instead, the plot revolves around several other matters. Eventually, two versions of Mickey—the aforementioned 17, who's more than a bit of a pushover, and 18, who understandably has developed a chip on his shoulder after so many deaths—end up existing together. There are rules about doubles, namely that both are terminated and no new variation is created, so while 17 wants to negotiate a way for both to survive, 18 is more than happy to try to kill his older version, particularly so that he can stay with Mickey's girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie). Pattinson's performance is impressive for how distinct he makes these two Mickeys, while adding a thick layer of off-kilter charm that makes the two cohesive and prevents us from asking too many questions about why their personalities are so different in the first place. Even that conflict, however, apparently isn't enough for Bong. He proceeds to fill the narrative with subplots that go nowhere, jokey ancillary characters who oddly become central to the plot, and, with a new focus on the creatures who don't eat 17 after that introduction, a new thematic through line that essentially tosses aside every idea and issue about Mickey's dilemma. The transition focuses on Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a failed politician who leads this expedition to the planet, and his ego-driven desire to look more powerful than he actually is. Ruffalo's voice and mannerisms are clearly aping a certain political figure here, and it's an unnecessary distraction, especially since the shift toward that character as a simplistic antagonist feels like a bigger distraction from the initial premise. Toni Collette, by the way, plays Marshall's wife, a woman obsessed with making exotic sauces, and that joke runs its course immediately. Bong's movies, of course, are often filled with social satire and, as becomes the case with the reality of the "creepers" in this one, environmental concerns. He's capable of some degree of subtlety or, on the other end, completely unconcerned with it. Mickey 17 definitely falls into that second category. While there's nothing necessarily wrong with that approach, the way Bong entirely reshapes the narrative here to fit those ends feels like a disservice to a smart premise, some potentially weighty ideas, and the tacked-on messages he's putting forward. Copyright © 2025 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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violent content, language throughout, sexual content and drug material)
