Spoilers abound!
Mickey 17, Korean director Bong Joon-Ho’s latest take on the sci-fi genre, is about clones. Or maybe it’s about fate? Or guilt? Or about where we draw the line on how many bodies a single soul can possess? It could also be about Trump. Maybe also about potential threesomes. A critique of capitalism is somewhere in there too. Even a comment on animal abuse. It’s definitely about death. Death, over and over again.
Bits and pieces of this oddball sci-fi dark comedy seem strikingly clear until you look away, and then the film’s message slips away again. Its barebones story reads something like this: Dopey and mild-mannered Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) takes a job on a spaceship as an Expendable, which entails having his body regenerated and memories uploaded to said new body every time he dies trying to complete a dangerous task (and if it isn’t clear from the double-digit number in the film’s title, Mickey dies, like, a lot). The film centers on the 17th Mickey, who faces a major dilemma when a new clone of him is created — before he’s even died.
So much of the film relies on absurdity, which is what makes it such a delightful hot mess to watch. When Mickey 17 finds himself stuck in an icy cave (and miraculously, not dead yet!), his “best friend” Timo (Steven Yuen) chooses to save Mickey’s flamethrower instead of the clone. “You get it, right? I mean, you’re probably going to die anyway,” says Timo. Mickey just nods in agreement. Even when the cave’s giant isopod-like inhabitants save Mickey from freezing to death, the Expendable’s angrier about how they didn’t want to eat him. “I’M GOOD MEAT!” Mickey screams at the confused aliens.
Even when the film attempts to deliver a political commentary on red-hat-wearing politicians and thinly veiled colonial rhetoric about populating the world with the “Aryan race,” the absurdity ends up overshadowing the message. The ship’s crazed leader/dictator Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) tries to be intimidating, but his oversized belly and ill-fitting veneers detract from his menace. (Side note: Those veneers are probably the film’s biggest stroke of comedic genius — you can barely understand what Ruffalo was trying to say, and that’s the point.) Marshall’s equally deranged wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) is far more focused on crafting the perfect sauces to accompany her lab-grown meals than leading the ship. Marshall’s right-hand man and head priest Preston (Daniel Henshall) sports an out-of-place chin piercing as he strokes Marshall’s ego and films his tenure as the ship’s dictator (like a sort of evil content creator).
A lot is going on in Mickey 17, and that works both for and against its favor. As a dark comedy, it hits all the right marks, giving audiences the chance to see Bong take his signature grim satire to new heights. However, as a critique of Trumpian politics, the film is sometimes a little too on-the-nose, coming across as more patronizing than anything else.
While perhaps not the best Bong Joon-Ho film ever made (fight me), Mickey 17 is definitely worth all the hype surrounding it. Its wild hodge-podge mix of dark humor, narrative themes, and mind-bending storytelling makes it a memorable ride, even if it occasionally goes off the rails.
