Mickey 17 Review
Bong Joon Ho’s post Best Picture return to cinemas is a little too absurdist, and a little too hamfisted, to be truly great; but there are some fun unique sci-fi moments here mixed with a wonderful lead performance.
Mickey 17 (Robert Pattinson) is an Expendable; a reprintable human used for an interstellar mission for humanity to do the jobs no-one else wants to do - be it fixing the outside of the spaceship, testing toxic gasses, being a labrat for vaccines, or fighting aliens on a new planet. When he dies, the ship just reprints a new one with all the same memories, all good. The only rule is there can’t be duplicates; two of the same Expendable can’t survive at the same time, or both will be permanently deleted. So when Mickey 17 surprisingly survives a run in with the native inhabitants of the new planet, and stumbles home only to find himself face to face with Mickey 18, the duo find themselves at a crossroads.
Mickey 17 tackles capitalism and the excess of big tech with the sort of subtlety that DOGE takes to cutting Government expenditure. It’s a sledgehammer of a message movie, not a scalpel, and while there is a lot to love about Bong Joon Ho’s new movie, the fact remains that it is not as well thought out, nor as compelling, nor as piercing a message movie as Parasite was.
On the fun perspective, the sci-fi themes and concepts here are fun to play with. The film explores some wonderful creature design, sci-fi tech design, and outer world concepts and looks beautiful as it does so. One of the best recurring moments is watching Mickey being printed; he jerks in and out, like a real printer would with a sheet of paper. It’s the sort of thing that brings real truth to a far out conceptual movie like this.
Robert Pattinson is an absolute tour de force here. In dual (or indeed, many many) roles here, he brings such an underlying and consistent warmth to a series of characters that are all the same, but all slightly different. He’s a joy to watch.
Most of the rest of the cast are fine - Steven Yeun is a standout - but the sticking point is, unfortunately, a little bit with Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette as the Trump-esque leader and his wife. It’s such an on the nose portrayal, and also so overblown in the film (Joon Ho gives it WAY too much screentime), that you wind up in a perpetual state of cringe.
Outside of that, Mickey 17 is a fun and original film that will keep you entertained, even if it doesn’t break the stratosphere.
