Mickey 17

Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 follows Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), who joins a space colony as an “Expendable,” a disposable worker who gets cloned and reprinted every time he dies for research purposes. Hilarity ensues when an accidental Mickey 18 is printed before Mickey 17 has a chance to die. While the film’s premise and execution are truly quite bizarre, it retains a sense of self-awareness and relishes in its unorthodoxy—I’m looking at you, Mark Ruffalo’s teeth. Yet despite the film’s bold choices and genuinely funny performances, it ultimately is unable to maintain the absurdity of its first act and falls into many of the expected beats of modern sci-fi action films.

Let’s start with what the film does well. Luckily, we need not look far, as its strengths are apparent from the very beginning. Robert Pattinson narrates the 30-minute opening, and through a combination of his Looney Tunes-esque performance and the positioning of a regular guy in a wildly absurd situation, we cannot help but like our protagonist. From the introduction of the premise, the viewer is drawn in and left pondering (as many side characters ask of Mickey) how it must feel to die over and over again. Our curiosity surrounding Mickey’s job makes us view death through his eyes—via a lens of humor and indifference. The film moves on to describe Mickey’s preceding circumstances and, as any sci-fi film must, world-build. Yet while narration and heavy exposition are usually tools to be frowned upon, here they work, as each scene adds another detail depicting how such a regular guy could be caught up in such a weird situation. In this way, the film successfully accomplishes three major things with its opening—endearing us to its protagonist, making us question how we would respond in his situation, and getting us invested in the sci-fi setting behind the premise. Genuinely a fun and engaging time.

Yet beyond the title card, the film loses steam. While perfectly set up to do some serious (and at times comedic) exploration of individuality despite replication and indifference in the face of death, Mickey 17 sacrifices these themes to become almost a screwball comedy featuring two Pattinsons and a roster of underdeveloped and only somewhat compelling side characters. What could have been an absurdist comedy with something to say about the human condition becomes a formulaic action film following the all-too-familiar pattern of action blockbusters—defeating some villain by achieving some goal and saving the day. On top of this, many subplots that raised excellent questions about one’s relationship to their own clone (sharing romantic partners, sacrificing oneself for oneself) were pushed aside in favor of the main plot and only haphazardly tied up as seeming afterthoughts.

Ultimately, Mickey 17 is a very fun watch but fails to be anything more than that. Perhaps the bar was set too high given the inevitability of comparisons to its masterpiece of a predecessor, Parasite, and Bong Joon Ho in the director’s chair wasn’t enough to save the film at the box office. However, the film has plenty of merit in its lead performance, its setting, and its jokes, which admittedly had me laughing pretty hard in theaters.