‘Mickey 17’: Attack of the Clones

Dying is easy, comedy is hard: that cheeky chestnut encapsulates the strengths and weaknesses of Bong Joon-ho’s joyously silly Mickey 17, a semi-hilarious and half-baked sci-fi satire that delights in debasing human life. Watching someone bite the dust feels horrible. But it’s unsettling how easy it is to watch—especially when the person dying takes it all in stride.

“Have a nice death. See you tomorrow,” says dubious bestie Timo (Steven Yeun) to simpleton chump Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson, smartly playing dumb), leaving him to meet yet another untimely demise. And yet another rebirth, too, thanks to cutting-edge technology that perfectly replicates his body and implants the most recent backup of his consciousness.

MICKEY 17 ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Bong Joon-ho
Written by: Bong Joon-ho
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo
Running time: 137 mins

It’s 2054, and Mickey, on the lam from a loan shark, has traded his life rights for a guaranteed ticket off Earth and onto a colonizer spaceship bound for the ice planet of Niflheim. He accepts a job as an “expendable,” an interstellar lab rat who his starship routinely exposes to cosmic radiation, alien diseases, experimental drugs, and any other potentially fatal situation—only for scientists to bring him back in brand-new, 3D-printed flesh. “You read through the paperwork, right?” warns the recruiter in a flashback. “It’s a pretty extreme job.” Replies Mickey in voiceover: “I shoula read through it.” 

So begins a 4½-year journey onboard a space-age vessel otherwise populated with adventurous pioneers slavishly devoted to a goofy overlord, faux-devout and vaguely Trumpian leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, reprising his thick-headed blowhard schtick from Poor Things). His wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) is the real brains of their cultish collective, which forbids conjugal visits on the ship—to conserve food and energy—in exchange for a sex encouragement program once they arrive on snowy, subzero Niflheim.  They plan to “infest, with love” once they get there: “A world on a pure white planet with people who look like us,” Kenneth snorts. And all done through natural childbirth, unlike planting microchips in artificially inseminated women—which apparently how people on Earth now have babies? Anyway, they want a pure human race, if you haven’t gotten the Aryan gist of it yet. 

And Mickey is the onboard guinea pig for their travails, trotted out whenever there’s a life-threatening situation. Always reprinted as a replacement, not as a multiple, Mickey goes through 16 iterations after being burnt, blinded, stabbed, gassed, dumped, and, once he gets to Niflheim, exposed to “all the viruses,” as one scientist explains. He’s a serially cloned meat matrix who accepts his lot with a benign resignation, even as people indifferent to his suffering routinely ask him, “What’s it like to die?” 

Is it really death if technology can bring you back to life? That live-die-repeat cycle last popped up as an action motif in the visceral video-game-inflected 2014 Edge of Tomorrow. Here Bong goes a bit deeper—but not too much deeper—exploring the purgatorial torture of reincarnation, folding it into a wider social commentary about the expendability of an underclass in thrall to the quasi-religiosity of charlatan politicians. But don’t worry: there’s also a lot of blood barfing. 

The literal gags and existential zingers are never too far from the occasionally wise but mostly ham-fisted insights into late-stage capitalism—a broad-strokes mix of slapstick and shock that, at its best, is a Bong signature. He loves to walk that taut narrative tightrope, most dazzlingly with the Oscar-winning Parasite, his far more nuanced upstairs/downstairs tragicomic masterpiece. 

Mickey 17 is at its best during the first half, creating an oddball speculative future that doubles as a weirdly giddy snuff film while ruminating on the intersection of technology and morality—or as Mickey would put it, “Ethical fights and religious blah-blah-blah.” Mickey even scores a girlfriend in the form of a special agent named Nasha Barridge (Naomi Ackie), who works for Marshall but doesn’t buy into all the tomfoolery. 

The big twist happens when left-for-dead Mickey 17 actually survives on Niflheim and makes his way back to the colony base, where they’ve gone ahead and churned out Mickey 18—at which point the movie really just drops its intriguing eternal-return conundrum and becomes a clone-inflected action comedy. There’s a subplot with bug-like creatures native to Niflheim which Marshall clumsily calls Creepers, there are some weak love-triangle shenanigans that never really gel, there’s a big final-battle confrontation that fizzles quickly. Interest wanes as the story starts to come off the rails while the movie does its best to wrap up all the loose ends, even as it’s introducing new ones. Feels like a thematic printer jam.