Cassandra Fong
Mickey 17 (2025), the much-delayed follow-up to Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite (2019), is an existential sci-fi romp of the perfect capitalist worker: a literally “expendable” clone who can be regenerated after a little thing like dying.
And, of course, Robert Pattinson is putting on his whiniest voice to do quite a lot of double duty. It is very much Moon taken to a dark, comedic extreme.
THEMES AND PLOT OF MICKEY 17
The satire is not subtle. Immediately the viewer picks up on the greedy cynicism, the ostentatious speaking style, the expensive suits and the right-wing populism. And, of course, the red caps sported by his supporters. Its release comes during an uncomfortably timely era.
“He has embraced all the absurdity and idiosyncrasy to make a beautifully empathetic film”
Our protagonist, the hapless silent-clown Mickey of the seventeenth iteration, is played with a kind of sincerity that is all the more sharply contrasted with his successor. After agreeing to a series of terrible business decisions with his fair-weather friend, Timo (Steven Yeun), he is forced to flee to space to avoid the retribution of a powerful loan shark. Without any unique skill that would otherwise earn him a spot on the last spaceship departing before the loan shark’s deadline, he agrees to become a menial worker.
ITERATIONS OF MICKEY 17
He, and all his successive iterations, undergo dangerous situations that the rest of the crew cannot be risked on. Upon the death of one, the next one comes out of a whirring printer with technology that was banned on Earth, and only occasionally caught by the crew of technicians. All of this takes place on an icy planet with native inhabitants referred to as “creepers”. They are sentient beings with language and family, they save Mickey from dying in an ice ravine and most certainly do not appreciate the intention of creating a “pure, white planet full of superior people” from their homeland.
“Its release comes during an uncomfortably timely era”
What’s it like to die? A recurring question throughout the film for Mickey. Certainly, at first everyone treats his mortality as casual. He dies a dozen times over in the first half hour, and there’s a truly audacious scene where Timo sobs while saying that it doesn’t matter if he’s killed on screen once since he can just be reprinted. He never appreciates the question; he says he’s scared every time it happens, that he hates it, and his acceptance of constant resurrection dies upon meeting a “multiple” of himself.
PERFORMANCES
A duplicate in looks but not personality, they initially compete over the love of their more competent girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) and panic over what their co-existence means. Pattinson cleverly uses his expressive physicality: Mickey 18 is more aggressive, more vindictive and sharp-tongued. He is much less concerned about things like his body being chopped up to appease the loan shark. They are each other’s antithesis while being physically identical, so it really did rely on Pattinson’s facial expressions and bodily gestures to distinguish between them (at least until the end), and he rises to the task amazingly.
CINEMATOGRAPHY AND DIRECTION
Bong’s visuals are spectacular as always, with the drab spaceship and swirl of white snow on the planet juxtaposed with the colorful clothes worn by the expedition crew and leaders. He has embraced all the absurdity and idiosyncrasy to make a beautifully empathetic film about an unlikely survivor and savior. Regardless of his string of interesting decisions (was that almost-threesome in space necessary?), Mickey’s ability to continue on after so much teetering on apocalyptic despair has happened is by far the most inspiring part of this space oddity.
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Featured image courtesy of Marta Valentinyi via Pixabay. No changes were made to this image. Image license found here.
