Mickey 17

You’re So Fine
You Blow My Mind
Over 16 Times, Hey...

Mickey 17
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
South Korea/USA 2025
Warner Brothers
UK Cinema release print

Warning: Some spoilerage.

Okay... so I don’t mind a bit of Bong Joon Ho but I’ve only ever been totally blown away by him once and that was for his brilliant giant monster movie The Host. His new film, Mickey 17, is pretty much what I expected from him, to be honest (on the strength of the trailer) and I had a pretty good time with it while, not being too taken with it at the same time.

The premise is that, in the not too distant future, a failed buffoon of an American politician played by Mark Ruffallo, satirically playing him as a kind of amalgam of Trump and Musk (which is not a hard stretch to amalgamate the two, to be fair), accompanied by his wife (played by the ever reliable Toni Collette) and a huge starship full of colonists is off to found the colony of Nipple-heim on the planet of their choice. On board they take an expendable, who is a guy who can be reprinted from recycled rubbish and implanted with all his former memories... and his job is to be the ‘canary in the cage’ for the mission. If you can imagine a canary in a cage which is deliberately killed with agonising and sometimes slow death on purpose, to develop vaccines and so on, in the field.

The current Mickey is Mickey 17 and he’s played by an actor I’m not all that enamoured of, Robert Pattinson... although he does a great job here playing the title character (with a Jerry Lewis voice) and his copies, who all exhibit slightly different personalities. And we start off with him accidentally dropping into a perilous, non-survivable position, about to be eaten by creatures and being abandoned by his pal, played by Steven Yeun. From this point we flash back to get the back story as to why Mickey decided to volunteer to be an expendable in the first place, before we catch up to it again a short time later.

Meanwhile, the somewhat more over-confident (to the possible point of being almost psychotic) Mickey 18 has been 'printed'. However, Mickey 17 is instead saved by the native creatures and when he returns to the ship and to his girlfriend played by Naomi Ackie (who is more than happy to have two Mickeys to sleep with at the same time), he is now an illegal ‘multiple’.

And things get worse when the indigenous, slug/armadillo-like population are gathering to take revenge on a president who is allowing his wife to use their tails to make sauces for her cooking projects. It all gets quite gripping and suspenseful with each twist and turn and it certainly doesn’t get dull.

Pattinson and the cast are all good with some nice framing and editing going on. There are some nice ideas too, such as Mickey’s memories being backed up onto a brick etc and the 3D cloning printer jerking back and forth in the process of making a new Mickey (like a photocopier going back for another scan pass). And it is full of ideas, somewhat reminiscent of the kind of things Philip K. Dick would have been writing about in the 1950s and on to the end of his career for sure.

My biggest problem with the film is that, for all the ideas on show and explored throughout the fairly lengthy narrative, nothing really surprising ever happens. Even the somewhat benevolent nature of the alien life form on the planet is kinda telegraphed early on in the movie and so, to me at least, the film becomes more of an exercise in pulling the various narrative threads together into a sustained story without really coming off the rails. The film changes tonally on the drop of a dime, so to speak, weaving between moving drama and high comedy but, that stuff seems to fit okay together for the most part and... I dunno, it’s a good film but not a great one, is what I left the cinema thinking. I mean, I could let another ten or twenty years go by without ever visiting it again. That being said, I don’t know what it’s like as an adaptation of the book Mickey7 by Edward Ashton but it feels like it’s a novel I should definitely sit down and read at some point. Just to see how different it is and if the book is, maybe, more subtle than the big screen version.

And that’s me about done on Mickey 17, I think. It’s an okay film with some big concepts, great special effects and some nice acting choices. If you like science fiction (as opposed to just space opera) then you should have an okay time with it. An easy one to recommend but don’t expect anything much more than what it says on the tin, in this one.