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.

Blink Twice

Me Two

Blink Twice
Directed by Zoë Kravitz
USA/Mexico 2024
MGM/Warner Brothers
UK cinema release print

Wow.

Blink Twice is the directorial debut of Zoë Kravitz (daughter of pop star Lenny Kravitz and actress Lisa Bonet), who also co-write the screenplay under the original working title Pussy Island... a name which she was intending to be the release title until it was eventually shot down... not a bad thing actually because that title might have been a bit of a spoiler. And talking of spoilers, I am going to do my best here to write this review without spoilers as best I can because, you should really go in blind to the plot details, as I did. But one spoiler about this specific review however is... when I say wow it’s because, well, this is one impressive directorial debut, for sure. And I don’t remember the director as an actress in the many films she’s appeared in other than, she played an impressive Catwoman in The Batman (reviewed here) and also voiced the same character in The Lego Batman Movie ( reviewed here).

Okay, so Kravitz does not star in the film herself. The main protagonist, Frida, played by Naomi Ackie, is having a hard time to pay the rent but she is obsessed with famous billionaire Slater King (played by Channing Tatum, who also is one of the producers of the movie) , who has publicly apologised for some unspecified abusive behaviour and has been out of the public eye for a while, going to an island he has bought to relax with his friends while one of his pals looks after the successful King Foundation. Frida and her roommate Jess, played by Alia Shawkat, accidentally hook up with King and are invited to go with him and his entourage to his private island for some decadent partying.

They agree and meet various other guests like Sarah (played magnificently by Adria Arjona) and, frankly, among the rest of the cast it’s a veritable who’s who, with no offence intended, of stars of yesteryear who somehow seem to have disappeared from the cinema goers radar for a while, it seems to me. These include an adult Haley Joel Osment (remember him... he sees dead people), Christian Slater, Kyle MacLachlan and the great Geena Davis. And, over the course of the endless partying, fuelled by a mixture of drugs and alcohol, things start getting a bit deja vu for Frida and some of the other guests. Put it this way, the audience will notice that one of the guests has gone missing before Frida does. And... that’s really as much as I want to say about the plot of the film... continuing my attempt to write this thing with no spoilers (because it’s the kind of film that really deserves no spoilers, if doable).

Okay, let’s talk about the impressive debut of Zoë Kravitz then. Now, I may be talking out of turn here but, the approach to filming this is not, I think, something which might be taught at a film school, I suspect. In some ways I might be justified in saying you can tell this is someone’s first film because of what it doesn’t do as much as what it does. But in this case, I don’t mean that in a negative way at all. Here’s what I mean...

Okay, so in my previous review on the blog for a new film called Starve Acre (reviewed by me here) I noted that, sometimes, the director would start off a scene focusing on a detail rather than give the audience the expected establishing shot that ninety nine out of ten directors would go for. Well Zoë Kravitz does that in spades in this movie, starting out with people in their headspace and then sometimes withholding any kind of establishing shot for a while.

The opening shot, for instance, of some kind of reptile (possibly a snake, actually, in hindsight) is held for a long time for no apparent reason... except you’ll find out exactly why we got that particular shot near the end of the movie. The film is bright, colourful and, when it breaks the accepted rules of film (or should that be expectations) by doing this kind of thing... it absolutely gets away with it and it all works well. Nothing here is done by accident and it makes me feel that Zoë Kravitz must be, already, a master of her craft. I remember when my best friend (sadly no longer with us) and I got out of a screening of Woody Allen’s masterpiece (of his many masterpieces) Shadows And Fog at the Lumiere cinema in London (also no longer with us) back in the early 1990s... he basically said, “... that’s just Woody Allen flexing his muscles. He walks all over the other directors out there...” and, at the time, I had to agree with him. Well, the way Kravitz and her crew pull you in with the shot design, cinematography and editing here to make, not only a great piece of art but also a very relevant and still timely film about a serious issue, makes me think the same of her. She’s just flexing her artistic muscles here... except it’s her debut as a director, people!

And not only that, although a lot of the elements of the story come as absolutely no surprise... for instance, the arc of Geena Davis’ character panned out exactly as I thought it would... it genuinely doesn’t always do what you think it’s going to do in a lot of other ways... often technically with the way it’s shot, as discussed above but, also with the paths Kravitz chooses to reach her final destination. And that includes a crazy ending which, I have to admit, I totally didn’t think she’d go with and, while it’s not quite what I would have expected, it’s a bold choice so... power to her.

Not only that but the effective score by Chanda Dancy (sadly not available on CD) and even the various needle drop songs, work really well with the film and lift the visuals they are accompanying. As does the sound design, which really focuses on the state of mind of the lead protagonist as much as anything else, it seems to me.

And that’s me just about done on the very cool Blink Twice. No idea in the film is really that original... she even steals a nice visual gag from an early scene in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie in an early moment here (review coming soon) but, that specific gag aside, Kravitz goes up to eleven on everything in the movie and, quite surprisingly, it all works very well. Hopefully this one will get a Blu Ray release soon so I can study it a little better. Worth seeing at the cinema if you can catch it at your local, for sure.