Mickey 17 2025 Movie Review Trailer

 Korean director Bong Joon Ho's third English-language film recycles the dark style and direct satire of "Snowpiercer" and "Okja."

While two Mickeys may be better than one, when you get to seven or eight (the idea in Edward Ashton's sci-fi novel "Mickey7"), or a number as unwieldy as 18 (the inflated figure in Bong Joon Ho's film adaptation), the prospect of an endless supply of gaping Robert Pattinson clones really starts to get tiring. The director of "Snowpiercer" returns to familiar territory with "Mickey 17," a screwball sci-fi satire set in a bleak future where Earth is no longer habitable, other planets must be colonized and the success of a four-year mission to the ice planet Niflheim hinges on disposable human copies called Expendables.

Director: Bong Joon Ho
Writers: Bong Joon Ho, Edward Ashton
Stars: Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun, Michael Monroe

Pattinson has traveled through deep space before, such as in Claire Denis’s comparatively stylish arthouse film “High Life.” Here, the star simplifies the matter to fit Bong’s big-budget, grunge-topian vision, playing a fool so desperate to escape a ruthless loan shark on Earth that he books passage on a mission ship to another planet, accidentally signing himself up for the Expendables program without reading the fine print. Doing so means literally signing his life away, as Mickey 1 (the original version of his character) agrees to have his body scanned and his memories archived, so that he can be replicated (and recycled) ad infinitum, whenever an unfortunate copy hits a snag.

That far-fetched premise should raise hundreds of plausibility questions, such as, why is he the only Expendable on board, and why don’t they do something more useful with that memory-duplication technology? In Bong’s hands, however, it gives rise to a tawdry montage of various mishaps, leading to dead (or nearly dead) Mickeys being dragged into the incinerator chute and melted down for regeneration. Narrating in a smarmy Steve Buscemi-esque drawl, Pattinson explains that each new iteration is made from salvaged waste — ashes to ashes, trash to trash — only to be spit back out into what looks like a giant 3D printer.

Bong’s swashbuckling script underscores how little the human crew in The Expendables thinks (and, by extension, how little Bong thinks about human nature) through several gags, such as the one in which an absent-minded technician forgets to place the gurney near the replicator, allowing a limp, freshly printed Mickey to spill out onto the lab room floor. When a different technology fails in the process, that mishap may explain why Mickey 17 comes off a little less self-deprecating than the others. And yet, they’re all basically made to die, as Mickey is thrust into situations where the lives of his fellow crew members are deemed too valuable to risk.

So to appreciate “Mickey 17” (which Warner Bros. will release in Imax on March 7, two weeks after its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival), you need to be comfortable with laughing at all the cruel and unusual ways Bong thinks to kill him, from vaccine testing to air sampling on an unknown planet. If that seems like perverse imagination for someone selling a fundamentally humanist message, here’s the central paradox of Bong’s sensibility: Maybe he’s not exactly the humanist his followers think he is, but rather a gruff, teen-minded satirist, operating in the vein of Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers.”

For true Bong fans, the film’s hectoring tone and irreverent sense of humor should feel like a return to that strange mix of sentimentality and cynicism we saw in the “Parasite” director’s two previous English-language projects: the gonzo meat-and-murder comedy “Okja” and the fast-paced, rich-eating thriller “Snowpiercer.” Sadly, that’s not the register in which Bong’s vision works best, and while it wins points for sheer weirdness (and the near-monochromatic, futuristic film noir look established by cinematographer Darius Khondji and production designer Fiona Crombie), much of “Mickey 17” comes off as sloppy, shrill and preachy — ironically, the very things that make Mark Ruffalo’s deliberately Trump-esque villain so irritating in this film.

The film picks up four years after the mission to colonize another planet is launched. In Niflheim, Mickey 17 is abandoned in a frozen cavern by Timo (Steven Yeun), the same friend who got him into this mess in the first place.

According to the film’s confusing ethics, the Expendables were banned on Earth but OK to be used and abused off-world, giving Marshall (a failed politician turned insecure prophet for the company-church overseeing migration) the final say on Mickey’s fate. For silly reasons, the law requires that there never be more than one copy of a person in circulation at a time (the polar opposite of “Star Wars” politics, where countless stormtroopers are copies of the same obedient super-soldier).

Though Timo assumes otherwise, the Creeper doesn’t kill Mickey 17. By the time the half-frozen survivor returns to the ship, his successor has already been imprinted, meaning one of them must be eliminated. Though their genes and memories are the same, each iteration has a slightly different personality. Mickey 18 is more aggressive, immediately assuming the alpha role to Mickey 17’s more submissive nature, which Pattinson suggests through his hunched shoulders and boyish-looking bowl cut.

They both want to live, which pits them against each other at first. They also crave the company of Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a sexually voracious rule-breaker aboard the ship, who relishes the idea of ​​having more than one Mickey to satisfy her—as long as her rival Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei) doesn’t rat them out. And so the two women selfishly agree to share the wayward doubles, while Mickey 18 plans a coup.

This plot is easy enough to follow, though the film insists on complicating it, as Ruffalo’s character (whom he plays with Colonel Sanders’ wavy hair, bright white false teeth, and an inconsistent accent) becomes increasingly tyrannical as his mission moves away from Earth. At every turn, his manipulative wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), looks down on him mischievously, encouraging his worst instincts (like the assumption that Creepers are a threat and therefore must be exterminated) while indulging in his obsession with sauces. Both are reminiscent of the dimwitted businessmen Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal played in “Okja,” with their outlandish costumes and over-the-top acting style. Bong might argue that our current reality is no less ridiculous, even though it’s all just as exhausting.

In Ashton’s book, the author imagined 10 fewer copies of Mickey, but Bong ups the count to 17, gleefully putting both character and star through their paces. Pattinson is incredibly good at all of this, subverting the image “Twilight” fans have of him by playing such an utterly pathetic character. For most of the film, Mickey is stuck in a Groundhog Day-style infinite loop, where he’s forever doomed to repeat the same thankless life, while being pestered with callous questions about what it’s like to die.

It turns out that modern science already has a version of the underlying cloning technology, experimenting on small groups of stem cells (rather than adult bodies with the memory imprinted on them). That approach avoids the indignity of putting a human through all that pain. Does putting Pattinson’s grim face on the phenomenon lead us to see it differently? For all of the film’s recycled themes (from condemning the gulf between social classes to advocating compassion for all creatures), it’s not clear that any useful allegories can be drawn from Bong’s darkly comic parable. A single viewing should suffice.

Watch Mickey 17 2025 Movie Trailer