Mickey 17 opens in theaters Friday, March 7. This review is based on a screening at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival.
The uniquely bleak Mickey 17 has chosen its cultural moment with precision (and a little bit of serendipity). After numerous delays – it was originally set to open in March 2024 – Bong Joon-ho’s follow-up to Parasite debuts as the first proper Trump Era 2.0 movie. It’s a jet-black, mean-as-hell sci-fi comedy about a near future in which life itself has been corporatized and reduced in value by a foppish upper class that hides its totalitarian aims behind supposed religious values. (And to really underline the parallels to real life circa 2025, the followers of this movement don some distinctive, scarlet headwear branded with political slogans.) To escape his debts on Earth, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) has signed up to be an “Expendable” on a lengthy space mission, meaning he could be endlessly given risky, potentially fatal jobs and even experimented upon with viruses and radiation, dying multiple painful deaths that he remembers each and every time he’s “reborn” from a jittery 3D bioprinter. Pattinson stars as several different versions of the infinitely replicable worker drone, a premise that, though it eventually takes a bit of a backseat, sets the stage for a wild-eyed, farcical adaptation of Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel, Mickey7.
While its philosophical musings on immortality and self are discarded, most of the book’s plot basics remain, including its acerbic opening scene in which we meet our point-of-view Mickey as he tumbles down an icy crevasse filled with extra-terrestrial worm-creatures on the alien colony Niflheim. His best friend and co-explorer, the hotshot pilot Timo (Steven Yeun), gladly leaves him to die since there’ll be a whole new Mickey spat out tomorrow. How we got here is something the movie covers in extended flashbacks, though Bong’s rhythmic approach to montage results in a worldbuilding speedrun. Nothing – no individual piece of backstory or information – really seems to matter, but this is part of the movie’s ugly, nihilistic charm, from which a few embers of humanity eventually spark (though you’ll have to wait two hours and change for this; the movie makes you work for it). When Mickey 17 is presumed dead after his plummet, his superiors at the colony are quick to replace him with an 18th copy, only for Mickey 17 to escape his icy fate and return to base. For reasons both pragmatic and religious, two copies of the same person existing simultaneously is a major no-go, leading to complications between Mickeys 17 and 18, as they try to figure out how to survive together in secret.
While they remain under constant threat of “permanent deletion,” solutions to their conundrum present themselves with astounding ease, but all this means is that Mickey 17 takes its expected turns early on before swerving in surprising directions. The primary danger to their lives is the colony’s leader, a fanatical politician with exaggerated veneers named Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) who, along with his gourmet-obsessed wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), towers over his underlings with promises of future greatness as they colonize Niflheim. Marshall’s methods come wrapped in thinly veiled white supremacy and compulsory, patriarchal heterosexuality. Every so often, he chooses one constituent at a time to wine and dine with steak (in lieu of their daily protein slop) to make them feel special, while convincing them – with shudder-inducing frankness – that their genetic purity is vital to populating the colony by way of “breeding.” What’s more, he carries out his methods courtesy of an organization that’s part ruthless conglomerate and part zealous church, a concentrated look at who holds the most power and influence in the modern United States.
This political element originates in Bong’s screenplay. So do the signature red hats worn by Marshall’s supporters, a purposefully Trumpian metaphor accompanied by several accidental ones that could not possibly have been planned – like a failed assassination attempt in which a bullet grazes Marshall’s cheek. That the film arrives amid the wreckage caused by the second Trump administration and the wannabe space-colonizer serving as its loudest cheerleader/biggest battering ram makes it all the more poignant, and all the more disheartening. Its villains exhibit stupidity and destructive evil in equal measure, resulting in a tale in which the very notion of checks and balances is the ultimate rebellion. That something so bare-minimum arises as heroic is both aspirational and punishingly depressing, in a political moment where the United States and its institutions feel like they’re being stripped for parts.
That this symbolism comes at the cost of a more character-driven story is occasionally irksome, but the time spent with each cast member is nothing if not enjoyable. Pattinson’s conception of Mickey 17 is strange and nasal, a gremlin-like wuss who can barely stand up straight. He’s the ultimate pushover – and he kind of sucks as a person, too. An early reveal about the planet’s native inhabitants depends on our easy interpretation of signs he refuses to see, given how much his self-loathing feeds his lack of empathy.
Mickey 18 is even worse. It turns out that expendable clones can vary greatly in personality; this results in 17 being usurped and outsmarted by a more violent, more cartoonishly cunning iteration of himself, with the question of his (and humanity’s) redemption looming over the story. The more time we spend even with the film’s ostensible heroes – like the narcissistic Timo, or Mickey’s delightfully unhinged security guard girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) – the more it seems like living under the thumb of economic oppression, and being made physically disposable in service of productivity, has driven each of these people entirely mad.
Mickey 17 is a deeply depressing comedic experience.
It’s a film in which chaotic gesticulation, cacophonous argument, and slapstick flailing often stand in for rigorous drama – for better or worse – leading to some of the most ludicrously feel-bad comedy this side of the recent U.S. election. Rather than presenting mealy-mouthed pablum about “resistance,” Mickey 17 is confrontational by virtue of its pessimism, transforming a mostly straightforward novel into a stark reflection of how the current political moment came to be – albeit without letting anyone (least of all, those of us at the mercy of these larger forces) off the hook for our own transgressions. If humanity is what’s at stake, then being robbed of it and shedding it willingly are two sides to the same dangerous coin, separated by a margin as razor-thin as the difference between 17 and 18.
