Mickey 17 ~ Review

It seems like late-stage capitalistic dystopias are all the rage right now. Whether it’s taking away their actual living time as in Alien: Romulus, or creating a working class composed of people with no memories as in Severance, our popular art right now is telling us in no uncertain terms that the tools of capital are trying to grind away our very humanity. This, strictly speaking, isn’t new in fiction (science or otherwise). After all Fritz Lang’s Metroplis is all about a working-class uprising. We are seeing more of it as oligarchs worldwide start taking over every aspect of our lives.

Bong Joon Ho’s dark comedic satire Mickey 17 imagines a world where a mega-corporation has devised a way to cheat literal death. In the distant future, a person’s memories can be implanted into a cloned body after they die. Instead of using this technology for literally anything else, it is used in the creation of a slave labor class named the “expendables.” These people are used for all sorts of things – difficult construction projects, human experimentation, or seeing just how inhospitable a planet can be. This expendable practice has been outlawed on Earth, so it can only be used in space. Trying to outrun loan sharks on Earth, the affable but dim Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) and his friend Timo (Steven Yuen), sign themselves up to be part of a four-year space mission to the recently discovered planet Niffleheim led by a preening narcissistic failed senator Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette). While Timo snags a pilot’s gig, while Mickey signs up as an Expendable…without reading the fine print.

So now, Mickey is a combination spaceship maintenance worker and lab rat. Repeatedly dying to help the mission, either testing a new nerve gas, being the human host to a virus, or just killed while repairing the outside of the ship. As the film opens Mickey is on his seventeenth copy and the ship has reached Niffleheim. It’s not all bad for Mickey though, he finds love with Nasha (Naomi Ackie) a member of the ship’s security force. However, during an expedition into the wilds of Niffleheim, Mickey is left for dead, with the expectation that the Creepers (the pillbug like inhabitants of the planet) will eat him. When that doesn’t happen, Mickey 17 returns to the ship only to find another Mickey (also played by Pattinson) in his place. What follows is a space opera meets farce as Mickey 17 evades capture (as multiples are supposed to be summarily executed), and tries to stop a war with the Creepers.

Mickey 17 is a wild, crazily ambitious, and hilarious film. Joon Hoo’s script (based on the novel by Edward Ashton) is frantic and all over the place, but even in the movie’s more chaotic moments, it will deliver a thought-provoking idea about the nature of death, or showcase Pattison's physical comedy chops as when Mickey 18 tries to kill Mickey 17.

Yes, the film's satire is about as subtle as having your legs sawed off with a chainsaw, but when the results are this entertaining, I think that’s okay. Robert Patinson anchors the film, with a hilarious and sympathetic turn. Pattinson’s work here is top-notch. Not only does he have to narrate the movie and explain this unhinged world to us, but he also has to play two different characters who are ostensibly the same person! Pattinson puts on a weird voice with a strange accent – which I found pretty funny and endearing. Naomi Ackie is great as Nasha who you completely buy as Mickey’s lover, she even gets a cool action scene in the film's climax.  

Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette are having the best time as the political leaders of this expedition. They both chew through the scenery like it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet. Ruffalo and Collette's performances could have easily pulled the movie apart, causing an insane amount of tonal whiplash, but thanks to Joon Ho’s confident direction their performances feel of piece with the rest of the film.

Capitalism will do its level best to take our humanity away, using our bodies and minds as literal grist for its ever-churning mill. The only way to escape the grind is through empathy. Mickey 17 is about finding that empathy. The film is a cross between the British comedy series Red Dwarf and Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind. If that comparison makes no sense or turns you off, I would stay far away. However, if that intrigues you, I guarantee you’ll have a blast.

Three and a half out of Four Stars