Review | Mickey 17

David L reviews the latest film by Korean director Bong Joon-Ho

Mickey 17 is the latest film by Korean director and writer Bong Joon-Ho, his biggest project after the success of Parasite in 2019. Joon-Ho displays his usual lack of pretension around the genre, going way beyond the more grounded affairs of Okja and The Host and even beyond apocalyptic works like Snowpiercer into an extraterrestrial, spacefaring odyssey, all the while displaying the mix of satire, pathos and class consciousness that he has come to be known for. The end result has met with a mostly positive yet tempered response, with some ranking it amongst his weakest works. But in my opinion, the film displays a fresh and subversive take on science-fiction which challenges the worst of the genre’s cliches.

The film focuses on the titular Mickey 17 (Robert Pattinson), the latest in a long line of ‘Expendables’, exact clones of a Mickey Barnes, a man escaping his debts who, in his desperation and recognition of lack of any useful skills, signs up for the worst job on the voyage to the planet Nilfheim, led by the failed Senator Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo). The job, which does not seem enticing from the description, is even worse in reality. Mickey becomes the ship’s guinea pig, dying over and over and over again in a series of painful and often cruel deaths. The overwhelming negatives of the job are offset by an onboard romance with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a security agent who is more proactive and assertive than Mickey (this Mickey, at least). 

Eventually, after an accident during a mission on Nilfheim’s arctic surface to capture a ‘creeper’ (the planets ‘alien’ species), he is left for dead, about to be eaten by the creepers when they seemingly decide ‘not to eat him’ (read: they help him out of the cave). He returns to the ship, only to find his colleagues had almost immediately reprinted him (Expendables slide out of a futuristic 3D kind of printer and have their consciousness downloaded into them out of a brick). Expendables were a contentious ethical issue on Earth, leading to them being banned except for off-planet expeditions, and the most contentious was the existence of ‘multiples’. Mickey 17 and the freshly printed Mickey 18 are now faced with the dilemma of how to survive, given their destruction is now mandated.

The parallels of the film to the real world are almost immediately apparent. Expendables are the expendable workers in the third world, outsourced and offshored to hide the exploitation and brutality they are subjected to. Kenneth Marshall calls to mind Donald Trump, though this similarity exists mostly at a surface level and Ruffalo’s performance is very much its own beast. Marshall obsesses over the whiteness and the purity of the planet, and speaks in terms of the ‘frontier’ and ‘settling’ the new world. His wife, Ylfa, is obsessed with creating better and better sauces, and wishes to use the creepers as a base for them, in a twisted satire of white people who exoticise foreign places through their food. Those with expectations of the nuanced critiques of existing society found in Parasite and Memories of a Murder are likely disappointed by the lack of subtlety in Mickey 17, which explains some of the responses from those usually enthusiastic about Joon-Ho’s work.

This, to my mind, misses the point a bit. The object of critique lies not necessarily within the real world, in the sense that there is a 1:1 correlation that can be found. Rather, what is being criticised and subverted here are the conventions of science fiction itself. In turning science fiction films on their head, Joon-Ho puts sci-fi films in conversation with works like those of Le Guin and Kurt Vonnegut, and helps provide light on real world issues by questioning the supposedly otherworldly fictions we create. 

That the villain should speak in terms of frontiers and undiscovered alien planets should raise some uncomfortable questions about franchises such as Star Trek, which have until recently been seen as on the left wing of sci-fi (though none of this proved effective in preventing it from being recuperated into Musk-praising slop). The idea of going out onto the planet so long as the air is breathable is portrayed as outright unrealistic, with Mickey exposed to a particularly nasty airborne virus and dying repeatedly until a vaccine can be created. In general the way the planet is spoken about is mocked implicitly as ignorant, settler arrogance – sweeping generalisations about the planet’s climate and its inhabitants are proven to be wrong again and again. At one point in the film, Marshall refers to the ‘alien’ creepers, only to be corrected quite bluntly that the so-called ‘aliens’ are the indigenous life forms of the planet – the humans are the aliens here. The creepers themselves completely smash the long-standing cliche that only a humanoid form means intelligent – the tardigrade-esque life forms prove to be as intelligent as (and more compassionate than) the human beings.

The choice of Mickey 17 as protagonist subverts usual expectations as well – no astronaut or starship trooper, only a worker. Whilst both of him move the story along in different ways (the noticeable differences in Mickeys despite their apparent interchangeable natures is another layer of the metaphor for workers as a social class), other characters gain consciousness and act accordingly – at one point it becomes apparent that people who appeared to be background characters have been organising. The resolution to the story comes not through lasers and militaristic firepower, but through solidarity and sacrifice. Rejecting the settler, techno-futurist fantasies of much existing sci-fi, Joon-Ho portrays a world not often seen on the silver screen. 

In a way, the film ends on a note similar to Snowpiercer – the only choice for workers to live freely and equally is to destroy the conditions, the system, which produces them. But whilst the earlier film displayed this action in apocalyptic terms, here Joon-Ho takes a different tack. When the Expendable printing machine is blown up in the final scene, Mickey can only smile as he finally becomes Mickey Barnes again. He might have been functionally immortal, but it was an immortal life only in the sense that he was constantly being reproduced as a debt-slave. In the abolition of ourselves as workers, what awaits us is the joy of being human again. That is a future worth fighting for.