Double Robert Pattinsons Are the Chief Reason to See Mickey 17

Bong Joon-ho isn’t a subtle director, and he never has been. The ominous killer-on-the-loose thriller Memories of Murder, the sardonic creature-feature The Host, the futuristic downer Snowpiercer, the multiple-Oscar-winning class-war parable Parasite: all of these movies are over-the-top by design, which is part of why people find them fun. A lover of comically grisly murders, inscrutable sci-fi fantasy creatures, and nasty little plot twists, he’s a director with the courage of his convictions. He cares a lot about things—the environment, the wide gulf between the haves and the have-nots, the dangers of oafish maniacs who have too much power—even if his overarching ideas never hit as hard as you might want them to. He’s a clever, inventive filmmaker, but at his worst, his movies can come off as whimsically forced.

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Bong’s Mickey 17, adapted from Ashton Edward’s 2022 science-fiction novel Mickey7, is based on a terrific premise: It’s 2054 and hapless Earthling Mickey Barnes, played by Robert Pattinson, is so desperate to escape the repercussions of a bad debt that he signs on to be part of a group of eager citizens headed to a new and ostensibly better planet known as Niflheim. But because this enterprise has been spearheaded by a sleazy politician with an almost messianic hold on his fans, Mark Ruffalo’s Kenneth Marshall, too many aspiring space cadets have signed up. To earn a spot on the spaceship that’s about to take off, Mickey volunteers to be an “expendable,” which means that he’ll be expected to undertake dangerous missions and to serve as a willing subject for any number of deadly experiments. In other words, he’s expected to die in the service of Niflheim’s colonization, though his death will mean nothing: each time he kicks the bucket, his body is regenerated by being fed through a special 3-D copier, and his memories and character traits are re-injected into his brain.

That means Mickey knows what it feels like to die, and it’s a question he gets asked a lot, though the endearingly fuzzy workings of his brain render him unable to adequately answer it. Besides, by the time the film opens, on the icy, unwelcoming planet Niflheim, Mickey has died and been regenerated so many times that the question means nothing to him. The movie backtracks to explain how he got to be Mickey 17 by running us through several of his previous Mickey incarnations, as well as detailing how he met his girlfriend, Nasha (Naomi Ackie), aboard Marshall’s grim, gray intergalactic ship: one evening, as the ship’s crew and passengers eat their skimpy, rationed cafeteria meal, Marshall and his scheming wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) emerge from their luxurious quarters to grace the group with their presence—and, incidentally, to ban sex until the ship lands. (It burns too many precious calories.) The cafeteria crowd beams at them with adoration—except for Nasha and Mickey, and as they roll their eyes in one another’s direction, it’s love at first sight.

These two adore each other, though Nasha is a high-level enforcer in the new world order and Mickey is, well, expendable. His life is hard, but he doesn’t complain; he tells much of his story in a whiny, snively voice-over, the litany of a guy who has never been able to stand up for himself. His frenemy Timo (Steven Yeun, largely wasted in a role that asks little of him), the guy who led him into such deep debt in the first place, is also on the ship; he’s no help at all, and more than once he thinks nothing of just letting Mickey die, because he knows his pal will just be re-copied the next day anyway. (It’s a fair point.) And frigid Niflheim isn’t a completely uninhabited planet: when the colonizers land, they meet a fearsome bunch of creatures with bodies halfway between buffalo and armadillo, with double rings of icky tentacles where their mouths should be.

Yet these critters, which Marshall has unimaginatively dubbed “creepers,” may not be as hostile as they appear: as in all Bong movies, the plot points and digressions zig-zag and intersect in ways that tend to be more enervating than energizing. Meanwhile, because of a mixup, Mickey 18 emerges from the copier before Mickey 17 has actually expired; in the copying process, duplicates are forbidden. A further complication: Mickey 18 has an aggressive, bitter edge that Mickey 17 doesn’t, but he also has some sense of self-preservation. These dueling Mickeys make make Mickey 17 a little like The Parent Trap, or the old Patty Duke Show, only in space and a lot less fun.

You could do a lot with the basic idea behind Mickey 17, especially with a sensitive, capable actor like Pattinson. His Mickey 17 is both endearing and frustrating, while his Mickey 18 is loaded with sneering swagger. Watching the two face off is at least mildly entertaining, and in what is perhaps the film’s wittiest touch, Nasha compares the two in bed: she likes them both, deeming one Mickey “mild,” the other “habanero.”

But the excessively complicated plot gets away from Bong. He loves his bitter jokes, and Mickey 17 is loaded with them: Ylfa is a self-styled gourmand who just loves sauces, and at one point she cruelly slices off the tail of a baby creeper so she can blitz in a blender; it’s one of those nasty little details that goes nowhere and ultimately means little. And the villainous Marshall bears a striking resemblance to two individuals who are decidedly living and not dead, he’s nothing more than a jokey grotesquerie. (Bong does love his tight closeups of wrinkled, lip-smacking baddies.) With his mania for colonizing other planets and his almost mystical hold over his glassy-eyed followers (they cluster around him adoringly in slogan-adorned red hats and sweatshirts), Marshall appears to be a mashup of you-know-who and you-know-who, two horror shows of the modern age who are ripe for lampooning. At one point, Marshall asserts, in his droning monotone of a speaking voice, that he intends to create “a pure, white planet full of superior people like us.” If that wasn’t a line made for 2025, I don’t know what is.

But that doesn’t make Mickey 17 a good movie. The picture was filmed roughly three years ago, so you could call it prescient: no one could have predicted the degree to which space-nut-billionaire Musk and democracy-destroyer Trump would meld into one shortsighted, four-eyed creature driven only by an impulse to trample and annihilate. Bong has said that the inspiration for Marshall and Ylfa could be any of the many self-interested leaders, with equally unprincipled spouses, that have graced the planet over the decades, from the Ceauşescus to the Marcos. That makes sense. Even so, there’s something depressing about the way Mickey 17 invites us to chuckle knowingly at these cartoon evildoers. It’s all just a little too arch, too wink-wink, nudge-nudge. In the end, Mickey 17 doesn’t make a strong statement about anything, not even our human right to enjoy, to the best of our ability, the one life we’re given to live. It’s neither funny, moving, or sharp. The time may feel right for a wry dystopian sci-fi adventure-comedy. But as satires go, this one is more mild than habanero.

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