Mickey 17 (2025)

A scrappy Robert Pattinson, smacked down 17 times, gets back up and fights

Mickey 17 (2025)

In theaters

It’s exhilarating to come across a movie that rockets across the screen straight from a director’s empathetic, wacky sensibility.

And lands hard. However bent – read unique – Bong Joon-ho’s outlook may seem, here he gives the audience a kick in the head with a swift, sure aim that few directors could pull off.

His approach is sprawling and goofy and I don’t think Bong cares if we find him a bit touched, a little loony. He’s a committed but blithe, grinning satirist. Preaching isn’t in his wheelhouse.

But I couldn’t look away from Mickey 17 because nothing in it feels focus-grouped. The script isn’t packed with fake “shocks” flung at a writers’ room white board to see what might stick (e.g., 2021’s bogus “climate change exposé” movie Don’t Look Up).

No question this morality tale zigs and zags, daring you to keep up. The wild plotting isn’t always easy to track. But there isn’t a particle of groupthink in it. You feel the dizzying freedom Bong is arguing for right from the opening shot’s laser-sharp, crystalline cinematography.

Bong (he adapted the screenplay from Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey 7) keeps the action abandoned, scattershot, unpredictable. It’s assaultive comedy. You have to think fast, or it barrels by you.

But Bong has a dead serious subject — ruthless, sadistic authoritarianism — so he doesn’t totally rely on make-’em-laugh slapstick. The characters feel lived-in, under threat, sometimes absurd, always relatable to our world, not that anyone wants to go to the nuthouse Bong seems to fear our planet may be turning into.

The story is set in 2054 AD, when science can transplant a human personality into multiple reproducible versions. Each re-programmed self is then tortured in experiments – medical, psychological – that embed still more experiences in its memory.

This morally questionable soul-invasion has been outlawed on Earth and sent into outer space. Within the vast, overcrowded working crew on board a gigantic ship is a select cadre of “expendables”. They’re guinea pigs who take on life-threatening tasks and undergo risky mind-altering procedures, in version after version of themselves.

Mickey inside the transformative capsule that will change him from one version to the next

They die at the end of each iteration, and that’s the point. Their expiration yields precisely the kind of data the project needs. Once it’s collected from the victims’ wracked bodies, they’re immediately brought back to life in a new version.

All their data, stored in a red brick hard drive, is re-planted into them for the next iteration, when they’re slotted for more brutal “advanced scientific” abuse.

Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), on the run from loan sharks, desperately signs on as an expendable on the spaceship bound for the planet Niflheim.

Each version of Barnes gets a new number after he dies, so 16 Mickeys have expired when the movie opens, with Mickey 17 on the floor of a snowy ice-walled ravine on the frozen planet Niflheim.

Struggling for breath, he looks like a goner since the planet is inhabited by squiggly indigenous creatures, shelled, beetle-like beings known as Creepers. Their wriggling toothy tentacles look like they could snap his head off.

But Mickey 17 doesn’t die at their hands, uh, claws. Surprisingly, the Creepers, inhuman but endowed with feeling for troubled life forms, whisk him up to the surface where he’s hauled back on board his colony’s ship.

This is not according to plan. Since he’s been presumed dead, he finds Mickey 18 (also played by Pattinson) in his bed. Mickey 18 is a nasty, scheming opportunist, not a harmless softie like Mickey 17, so they’re bound to clash. Pattinson deftly keeps them looking and sounding distinct as they snarl and fight like caged rats.

But they need to cool the animosity because they face a major problem. “Multiples” are forbidden on board ship. If found out, both Mickeys will be executed.

Who’s running this mad-show and what does he want? The colony’s cruel nutcase-in-chief is Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a failed politician turned alarmingly Trumpian, with a heartless Musk-like demeanor, who’s seeking a glory he couldn’t achieve on Earth.

Kenneth (Mark Ruffalo) and Yifa (Toni Collette) are the project’s sinister masterminds

Aiming to conquer what he thinks is an uninhabited, snowbound planet, he’s goaded on by his cold, ambitious wife Yifa (Toni Collette), a wickedly “smiling” Lady Macbeth.

All that’s keeping Mickey 17 safe is his romantic tryst with Nasha (Naomi Ackie). She smartly hooks up with Mickey 18, too, since protecting both of them is the only way to save either of them.

In Ackie’s ripe, sensual performance, Nasha takes deep pleasure in the two Mickeys’, uh, bodily similarities, and giddily postpones sorting out the differences.

Kenneth is a politician, a pseudo-religious icon, a corporate chieftain, and an entertainer (he hosts a megalomaniacal TV show) who needs to conquer Niflheim to give his vast cloning start-up a home base.

The Creepers are in his way, so he’s decided to exterminate them. He denounces them as “aliens”, though he’s landing on their planet.

But the Creepers, the two Mickeys and Nasha all have something to say about that. The confrontation makes for a rousing, oddly stirring climax. Life, whether crushed one person at a time or imperiled on a grand scale, is worth fighting for.

Or so insists Bong, nutty professor and empathetic humanist rolled into one.

Does the writer-director sometimes veer off course? Yes, but I’m not sure how I could have talked him out of a drug-dealing subplot or some over-the-top grotesquerie (Ruffalo and Colette are adept actors, but they don’t give their characters quite enough slippery nuance to symbolize exterminating evil).

I also saw no need for the endless shipboard bickering about food. Yifa for no clear reason is obsessed with sauces, while Marshall allows the crew only minimal, wretched meals. And a tense turning point where a creature is dangled in jeopardy goes on too long.

But Bong’s full-throated protest of ill-treatment of both humans and other living things by the greedy and powerful is what drives his vision, shambling and knockabout as he gleefully keeps it looking. The multiple screeching voices don’t drown out the message, they amplify it.

Nasha (Naomi Ackie) and Mickey 17 (Robert Pattinson) form a tight bond in the chaos

Right and wrong have become hideously distorted. Viewers around the world will be able to draw parallels to the avarice and despotism seeping into countries on multiple continents today.

I think the passion inherent in Bong’s life-treasuring mission, highfalutin as those words sound, explains why he refuses to let up on the mayhem, won’t calmly reason but instead bucks and howls with unbridled gusto, recruiting the audience to his cause with laughter.

Pattinson’s charming range here keeps the movie centered, even at its most frantic. What makes him such fun to watch is that he gives the battered Mickey 17 a heart of simple inoffensiveness. The guilelessness in his DNA is never extinguished.

Yet that latent, undernourished sweetness endows him with the gumption of a survivor. His meekness is what keeps him open to figuring a way out of the mess he’s fallen into, a creeping moral lethargy that the director makes uncomfortably familiar to us looking on.

That Pattinson makes the icy Mickey 18 equally vivid shows us the dark side that could lurk in any of us. It’s a subtle acting achievement in a double-dimensioned role that’s necessarily frisky, wildly physical.

The jittery Mickey darts around so much because he’s been divided against himself, the inhumane transgression which slowly dawns on him

Nobody is safe when a society’s moral compass is misplaced. Whether Mickey realizes it or not, even at his most passive he’s running for his life.

Twitchy, scrambling Mickey is continually being pushed around. But he summons the pluck to keep unfeeling manipulators – who get 18 painful whacks at him – from wiping him out.

Decency turns out to be its own kind of counterpunch. We can only hope such a secret weapon might surface for us, too.