Mickey 17
Now that the movie is out, we can see they were right -- it is extremely strange and very silly. If you were expecting a serious, prestige drama from the hottest auteur on the block, you may do well to go back and watch Director Bong's other English-language works ("Snowpiercer" (2013) and "Okja" (2017)), which were both dark comedies with a similar goofy tone. Where "Mickey 17" differs (and as a result, feels slightly off compared to his past works) is that its script is nowhere near as tight, balancing so many different plots and themes that it threatens to tip over into chaotic disaster at any moment. Bong is too talented to let that happen completely, but the end result is more of a beautiful, interesting mess than the stone-cold masterpiece we were all hoping for.
In some ways, this is a modern update of Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi satire "Starship Troopers" (1997). Set in the year 2054, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is a dim-witted loser that flees the planet to escape his debts. He manages to get on board a spaceship leaving Earth to colonize the planet Niflheim by agreeing to be an "expendable" -- someone given dangerous and lethal assignments who are then cloned and regenerated again and again. The ship's crew gleefully sends him off to die many times, as a montage shows Mickey dying in various ways, including (but not limited to) accidents while fixing the spaceship, exploring dangerous caves, and being exposed to alien viruses until a vaccine can be made from his blood. Mickey takes it all in stride, more annoyed at the people who repeatedly ask him what dying is like than the act of dying itself.
Some of the more eye-rolling satire comes from the expedition's leader, politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his devious wife Ylfa (Toni Collette). Marshall is a vain, religious, boneheaded dictator that will feel familiar (and Ruffalo is clearly doing a Trump impression), interested in eliminating Niflheim's local population of cute armadillo-like creatures so he can build a new colony of people with, let's say, a pure bloodline. Mickey develops an affinity with the local creatures, who just want to live in peace, only bothered when their children are captured for study by the human invaders. All of this stuff is treading very familiar thematic ground and feels surprisingly obvious for Bong, who seems to have fallen into the trap of trying to satirize our un-satirizable modern times. Sure, Ruffalo and Collette's buffoonish antics are mildly amusing and their callous disregard of both their crew and the local populace is topical, but it's not really very biting or even interesting material in 2025.
The movie flirts with more meaty material when it chooses to focus on Pattinson's Mickey, who grapples with the body v. soul conundrum in moments that show up all too rarely. Pattinson is really making the most out of a role that allows him to express the full range of human emotions, imbuing different Mickey's with different voices and body language, and selling the moments of quiet reflection before being sent screaming into another wacky situation.
Unfortunately, there's just too much going on to really dig into any one theme at more than a surface level. This is maximalist, big-budget, blockbuster entertainment, and there isn't time or room for much subtlety, for better or for worse. The creature effects and snowy alien world are beautifully captured with impressive CGI; the movie sure looks great (and expensive), and Bong knows his way around blocking an action set piece. The movie always has your attention -- it's entertaining -- but it just doesn't seem to really strive for a lot more than that, which is maybe a little disappointing. As things get tied up in neat bows by the end -- Naomi Ackie gives a designed-to-be-fist-pumping "fuck you" speech directed at "Trump" and his cronies, who all get their just deserts -- it's tempting to give the movie a shrug as the credits roll, previously unthinkable after any of Bong's other works.
Bong and crew are clearly having a lot of fun here, playing in a studio sandbox with likely not a lot of restrictions. And the movie is fun to watch -- a wild, colorful piece of work that could appeal to a wide audience. It's likely only viewed as a disappointment when measured against the director's previously unassailable filmography, which says a lot when a "pretty good" movie feels kind of like a failure.
