By Brian Susbielles

Six years after his Palme d’Or, Best Picture Oscar-winning masterpiece Parasite, Bong Joon Ho is finally back. Making his third English-speaking film, Bong is back in the sci-fi, social satire, and dark humor pile with this bleak look on our future. Earth isn’t doing so well, and unless you have money and aren’t under the thumb of loan sharks who will kill you if they don’t get paid back, death comes quite bloodily and mercilessly. Initially a 2024 release that got put back to now, debuting at this year’s Berlinale, it seems a bit lucky that Bong, unafraid to give a hot take about class and the have-nots, is seeing Mickey 17 come right after President Trump’s re-election and the events that have happened so far after nearly two months of this current presidency.

Mickey Barnes (Robert Patterson) and friend Timo (Steven Yeun) are both in debt due to a failing business and choose to take jobs in space. While Timo has a sweet gig as a pilot flying into unknown planets, Mickey signs up as an expendable – someone who will die doing various experiments and be reprinted to retry and go to different places knowing these hazardous jobs will result in his death. As the first thirty minutes show, Mickey accepts the job and gets poisoned, put through extreme temperatures, and has fatal falls to keep reaching new heights from Mankind in their pursuit for a better future. Oh, who am I kidding, it’s not for Mankind. It’s for a Trump/Elon Musk-type figure named Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his gourmet-obsessed wife (Toni Collette).

For Marshall, it’s all about him and trying to show himself off as a genius and trying to be a hero in changing the world for “everyone.” A cult develops around him and his wife, especially for people who need hope from the decay of home for the new colonization of the planet Niflheim, which is full of “creepers,” a group of native species that graze the tundra like herds of buffaloes. It is on that planet that Mickey 17 is thought to have died; however, Mickey comes out of it alive, returns to headquarters, and discovers that they have already birthed out a new Mickey, Mickey 18. The problem is that if duplicates of a person are found, Marshall rules that they are to be killed and all traces of the person are to be destroyed.

Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 are two separate personalities of being the same person, which still attracts his girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who also has her doubts after years of service. While Mickey 17 is the more innocent person who knows how the game works as much as he is resigned to the difficult job, Mickey 18 is the more aggressive version trying to fight back with violence and doesn’t trust the older version. Patterson stretches his arms out in creating two separate identities of the same character; he even said that his voice imitations are based on the cartoon Ren & Stimpy. He is effective and very funny in creating these dueling personalities from the same character. 

Bong Joon-ho is not afraid to go after the bleak, and he does it again with Mickey 17 in his dark, twisted way very much like The Host and Okja. It is probably the darkest in tone because here he is telling us the future is bad, especially with our current state of affairs. The entire sets are big and gray, like brutalist architecture, except the aestheticism is intentionally depressing. However, it feels too bloated at times and not-so-subtle in its satire against space colonialism, the ultra-wealthy, and how Mickey is a symbol for every lower class person as being expendable. It becomes a more conventional sci-fi story than we’d expect, and Bong is someone who isn’t conventional. Maybe it is him trying to stretch out the original novel by Edward Ashton (originally called Mickey7) to the limits of what he wants to say. 

Despite falling short of expectations, high ones because of how Bong has elevated his game the last twenty years, Mickey 17 is still a fun ride. It doesn’t require the mental gymnastics of his previous works to eat through the disgusting, experimental food Marshall’s wife puts out there to see the rotten core Bong always goes for. Nihilism is the heart of it all, and trying to find something to live for besides being the indefinite subservient to the worst of capitalism is always a gap Bong loves filling for our entertainment, even if it doesn’t always fit perfectly. 

3 ½ stars

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