Review of Mickey 17 (d. Bong Joon Ho, 2025)

      You could forgive Bong Joon Ho, the lauded South Korean filmmaker, for suffering from a bit of mid-career ennui. After all, his last film, 2019’s Parasite, was less a movie than a world-conquering phenomenon, finding all manner of success commercially (it grossed more than twenty times its 11-million dollar budget) and artistically (it won top prizes at Cannes, the Academy Awards and the Grand Bell Awards in his home country, not to mention hundreds of others near and far). That a Bong film could be regarded as something of an instant classic wasn’t exactly far-fetched: from thorny neo-noirs like Memories of Murder (2003) and Mother (2009) to kaiju riffs like The Host (2006), he’d long cultivated an inimitable style that moved between genres and modes with uncommon dexterity. More surprising was the way in which Parasite became the crossover sensation in the West that Bong’s two previous films, the English-language sci-fi spectaculars Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2016), didn’t. Perhaps Parasite—a blood-stained, Hitchcockian satire of class politics—translated with unusual lucidity during a year of similarly-themed films, from the acrid laughs of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out to the more labored provocations of Todd Phillips’ Joker. In a transnational cinematic marketplace all too eager to envy the rich and eat them, too, Parasite’s success seemed pregnant with possibility, the herald of a new era of moviemaking both more global and politically-conscious, all while remaining just as entertaining in the bargain. How, then, could Bong possibly cash-in on such impossible expectations? What does a climber do once they’ve conquered Everest? 
 

      There is a sinking sense of lost horizons—a feeling that a formidable talent may have reached every apex he once longed to summit—in Bong’s latest, Mickey 17. The film is an adaptation of Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, which centered on a deep-space colonization mission that relied on the usage of “expendables”—misbegotten souls who volunteered to be cloned and then used for the most perilous tasks, re-spawning as different iterations of themselves after each time they perish—to tame an alien-ridden planet. Trouble occurs when the seventh iteration of our protagonist, Mickey, is presumed dead after an icy cave collapses beneath his feet during a scouting mission. No sooner have his bosses printed Mickey number-eight than Mickey number-seven surprisingly returns to his quarters, confronted with his double. Company policy dictates that, in the case of duplicates, both will be exterminated, meaning neither Mickey can live while the other survives. Their ensuing battle for survival thus takes place on rich psychoanalytic terrain. Doubly (Septuply? Octuply?) so, given that Mickey7 and Mickey8 have very different comportments: the former seemingly his gawky and diffident superego, the latter his jauntily libidinous id. What they share, then, is an intimate understanding of not just pain and death but of their roles as cogs in a machine, ones they seem damned to thanklessly fulfill for eternity. Ashton’s expendables are one of the most literal conceptions of “human capital” ever put to page, and their wretched fates are the source of rather obvious class commentary: even in futures and galaxies far, far, away, workers will never have anything to lose but their chains.  
 

      Such a reading could just as easily apply to Parasite, which papered over its own moments of obviousness (an upstairs-downstairs satire that leaned on the traversing of actual staircases as its primary formal motif wasn’t trying to fool anyone otherwise) with a surfeit of stylistic brio and razor-sharp comic timing. It’s something of a shock, then, to see Bong return to this well in Mickey 17 and draw so comparatively little. The reworked title alone tips a hand towards the main problem: Bong’s added—and thus also breezily expended—an additional ten Mickeys (all played by Robert Pattinson), and that’s just the most literal instance of overkill in a movie that combines clumsy sociopolitical haranguing with narrative beats and aesthetics lifted from other, better movies. Some of these are Bong’s own: we have both an incipient worker uprising straight out of Snowpiercer and a cuddly breed of non-humans wrongfully rendered as grist for the capitalist mill à la Okja. The rest comprise a grab-bag of sci-fi hand-me-downs: Starship Troopers’ (1997) caustic takedowns of the military industrial complex, The Thing’s (1982) frozen, windswept vistas, even Arrival’s (2016) focus on the importance of translation in securing humanity’s future beyond the stars. Worst of all, the film’s sunny epilogue finds their former totalitarian corporate overlord (Mark Ruffalo) perfunctorily dispatched but the march towards colonization otherwise unimpeded. The new boss, it certainly seems, isn’t all that different from the old boss, yet Bong demands we view this as progress. We ought not to be fooled by such perfunctory posturing yet again. 
 

      Incoherent as critique and plagued by atypically baggy pacing, Mickey 17 seems sure to be one of its maker’s worst films. Why, then, see it? While most of the supremely talented cast follow Bong’s lead with some of their least-inspired work in recent memory (this includes Toni Collette, Steven Yeun, and, most egregiously, Ruffalo, who between his work here and his Oscar-nominated turn in 2023’s Poor Things, seems to be conducting an experiment in how much scenery one repugnant supporting character can chew), one man emerges from the muddle unscathed. Robert Pattinson—who’s had his own circuitous Hollywood journey from failed teen-heartthrob to remade indie-stalwart all the way back to (caped-)crusading leading man—is in positively giddy form here, locating the precise pitch between farce and polemic that the rest of the picture never does. In the title role, he affects a helium-pitched, nasally whine, slack jaw, and puppy-dog eyes for his beloved, fellow worker bee Nasha (Naomi Ackie). As Mickey 18, he lowers his voice while upping his cunning, providing a worthy foe for our sweet, stupid would-be hero. Gamely capable of playing however many Mickeys Bong foists upon him, his performance proves that, even after reaching great heights, one can still relish the thrill of the next climb.

 

Reviewed 3/28/2025