Mickey 17 – REVIEW

Robert Pattinson and Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17


I had a certain experience with this movie that I’ve had with very few: bewilderment. When a movie ends, I usually have my mind made up on if I liked it or not. This time, though, I had no idea what to make of Mickey 17, the latest movie from Bong Joon-ho and his first since the historic, Oscar-winning Parasite. I meant to publish this review a few days back, but I was just stunned by this movie for a while. Whether or not it was positive or negative, Mickey 17 genuinely did stump me for a while. This is based on a novel by Edward Ashton, Mickey7, and mainly follows Mickey Barnes, a man who joins an ambitious space colony to work as an “expendable,” a disposable employee for the company that’s sent to die in various ways in the name of science to develop ways that humanity can move to a new planet. After he dies, he’s cloned with all of his memories and personality in place and sent back to work, just to die over and over again. There’s also a lot at play here: how he finds his way to this job, how cloning (or “printing”) works, why “printing” is so controversial, why humanity is looking into space colonization… It's a lot to cover. There are only a few things I’m fully positive on here, and one of them is Robert Pattinson’s multiple performances as Mickey. It’s not a hot take to say that Pattinson is slowly but surely becoming one of the best actors working today, and Mickey 17 just furthers that point. He does a good job of making sure that Mickey 17 and 18 are different enough to know who’s who, but still showing that this is technically the same person. On top of that, the effects overall, but especially when the two Mickeys are on screen together, are pretty great. The overall worldbuilding and how the world in this story reveals itself was also structured well. We don’t learn every little detail about the world until we need to, and the more the world is fleshed out, the more immersive it feels. I was actually really jealous of how they revealed why “printing” is only done in space instead of on Earth. The biggest thing that ended up holding Mickey 17 back is that none of the characters outside of Mickey are fleshed out well, if at all. The biggest disappointment in that regard is probably his girlfriend, Nasha. I really enjoyed Naomi Ackie’s chemistry with Pattinson, and she eventually does get some great moments, but it felt like too little too late. Mark Ruffalo, who plays the politician that flees to space after losing two elections (and his supporters wear red hats), is fun in his role, but he feels like he’s in a much sillier movie. The same goes for Toni Collette, who plays Ruffalo’s wife. I’m not going into the rest of her because that’s really all she is in Mickey 17. I was also disappointed that Steven Yeun didn’t get a lot to do, but he does shine in the scenes he’s in. It also felt way too long for a 140-minute movie, but that’s more of a personal thing. It probably could’ve been cut down closer to two hours, but the rumor is that Bong Joon-ho apparently had the final cut, so maybe that’s just me. While I did take some time to be able to put my thoughts together on it, Mickey 17 ended up being a lot more of a mixed bag than I was hoping. The good stuff here is really great, and I think there’s good discussions to be had within the different elements of the movie like the ethics of human cloning, but there was just so much in Mickey 17 that it ended up not being about anything.


Ryan’s Grade: B-