If a man is the sum of his memories, Mickey 17 is the sum of his mortalities.
Existence is cheap in Mickey 17, and Robert Pattinson’s Mickey Barnes knows it better than anyone. He’s an “Expendable,” a human-shaped insurance policy against workplace hazards on the ice-locked hellscape of Niflheim. If he dies – and he will – another copy rolls off the printer, memories intact, ready to die all over again. It’s an arrangement that works just fine until one day, it doesn’t. Mickey survives. And so does his replacement.
Bong Joon Ho is no stranger to twisting genre conventions into social satire, and here he takes the disposable workforce concept and runs it through a darkly comic, existential meat grinder. There’s a distinct whiff of The Prestige if you swapped stage magic for corporate cost-cutting and added the kind of bone-dry absurdity that made Parasite so sharp. Pattinson, ever game for characters in various states of unravelling, plays both versions of Mickey with a wearied, deadpan fatalism, watching himself play out a losing hand (sometimes literally) with no good moves left.
Mark Ruffalo relishes the role of the colony’s smarmy leader, Kenneth Marshall, a failed politician and would-be messianic overlord. He’s the kind of man who talks grandiloquently about “the greater good” while gleefully throwing bodies into a meat grinder and hoarding resources while luxuriating with his entitled, self-centred spouse Ylfa (Toni Collette), exuding the kind of callous, autocratic malevolence that can justify just about anything in the name of creating the perfect sauce – because for her, justice matters less than jus. The bleakness of Mickey’s life would be unbearable were it not for Naomi Ackie’s Nasha who brings warmth, tenderness and a little actual humanity at the shrinking moral centre of a mission that treats human life like a fungible and disposable row in the grand spreadsheet of military-industrial corporate priorities.
Bong crafts a world that’s equal parts grungy techno-dystopia and frozen wilderness, a fusion cocktail of Starship Troopers social satire and the absurdist bureaucratic nightmare of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. It’s sci-fi that doesn’t lean on spectacle so much as character and concept, bolstered by a reliably winning multiple performances from Pattinson who manages to make every Mickey – no matter how brief their screen time – feel both unique and still familiar, a pitch-black parody of Doctor Who‘s regeneration and the multi-Doctor story that series would never dare give us. Darius Khondji’s cinematography captures the cold indifference of both the ship and the planet in every frame, making those fleeting moments of warmth shine out like flickering candles in the dark. The film’s production design revels in that unsettling contrast between the futuristic and functionally lived-in, giving the more high-concept sci-fi a solid grounding.
If there’s a flaw, it’s that the film’s reach exceeds its grasp, and it can’t quite do justice to all of its ideas. In focusing on Mickey’s story – central as it is – Mickey 17 is forced to be economical with the world-building and we’re left to piece together the scraps of information gleaned from glimpses and fleeting references. The nature of the “church” with which Kenneth Marshall has allied himself to in order to bolster his power or the colony’s social hierarchy as they remain shipbound and under siege from the planet’s icy winter is frustratingly light on detail and the movie often skirts the edge of profundity before snapping back to its more nihilistically comic roots. In a genre stuffed with stories about rugged individualism and heroic survival, Mickey 17 is refreshingly altruistic and pro-co-operative. It doesn’t ask whether humanity will conquer the stars – it simply shrugs and assumes we will and that we’ll still be clocking in for minimum wage when we get there, so it’s important that we look out for one another – and anything we might meet out there.
