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Anyone who read Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7 could see why director Bong Joon-ho wanted to adapt it for the big screen. Bong’s filmography, less of an output and more of an oeuvre, is pretty singularly defined by its interest in the everyman, the little guy, the David — and how the greedy Goliath really loves power, control, and the segregation inherent in those endeavors. His last three films, Parasite, Okja, and Snowpiercer, in backward chronology, have been anything but subtle about his disdain for the capitalist industrial complex.
Which is why Mickey7, now titled Mickey 17 and now playing in cinemas (I guess 7 Mickeys wasn’t enough for Bong? A couple of Oscars and $118 million can buy you all the Mickeys you want, I suppose), was the perfect fit for his sensibilities.
Set a couple of decades in the future, Mickey (Robert Pattinson, in perhaps his silliest performance), eager to escape the threats of a loan shark, signs up to be an ‘expendable’ on a newly colonized planet, Nilfheim. The job, and yes, it looks as terrible as it sounds, is to be a real-life crash dummy or human lab rat, testing the conditions of space, the new planet, and the ongoing research. When he begins choking or his skin begins to boil, and he inevitably dies, he’s just reprinted again, exactly as before, with all of his memories intact. That’s how he’s up to Mickey 17, as the last 16 fellas weren’t so lucky. It’s a job with ‘no worker’s comp, no union, and no pension benefits.’ When his hand gets chopped off during a task outside the ship, folks eating their lunch just watch it float by in space, completely unmoved. It is his job, after all.
The expedition is led by former congressman Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, having a ton of fun), a temperamental dictator wannabe. The parody here is about as subtle as an SNL cold open — he’s President Donald J. Trump, complete with a badly tinted orange tan and his own variation of the jerk-off dance that Trump does in place of the ‘Y.M.C.A.’ His fanatical following of red-hat-wearing idiots and self-serving wife (Toni Collette, who’s more Ivana than Melania) have set out to create ‘a pure, white planet full of superior people like us.’ It only takes eyeballs to notice that most of the hardest workers on the ship, those relegated to the crappiest jobs, are people of color: Naomi Ackie and Steven Yeun among them.
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But Mickey’s job seems like the worst one, just dying over and over again. The various reprints can have variant personality traits, like sluggishness or irritability, and this 17th version is kinda dweeby and sweet. His hair is a constant mop of bedhead, or deadhead, if you will, and if he had a spirit animal it would be the little, wide-eyed guy in the disheveled fox meme. When he’s believed to be left for dead in the latest mission, they go ahead and print Mickey 18, a more ill-tempered derivative. After 17 wakes up, alive and well, and stumbles back to the ship, the two Mickeys have to decide which one will be allowed to live. His girlfriend, Nasha (Ackie), doesn’t see the issue and is turned on by the ménage à trois, but simultaneously existing multiples are a strict no-no in Nilfheim. As Marshall and his goons attempt to keep the expendables (you can sometimes feel the word ‘deplorables’ coming from their lips before they say the word ‘expendables’) in line, the plebians of the excursion become increasingly unsettled with, and consider an uprising against, the fascism inherent in their new government.
For Bong Joon-ho, inspirations are aplenty. In his review of Ashton’s novel, writer Andrew Liptak called it, ‘part Andy Weir’s The Martian and John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and Sue Burke’s Semiosis.’ The cinematic influences, both thematic and aesthetic, come from Avatar, Edge of Tomorrow, and The Empire Strikes Back, with shades of Bong’s movies Okja and Snowpiercer. I’m not sure if it’s as strong as any of those projects (Mickey’s ceaseless voiceover narration, a holdover from the novel, is tired and by no means cinematic — and at 137 minutes, it feels over a few times before it’s actually over), but if you like those movies, the Netflix algorithm will spit this one out at you one day. Fans of Bong’s previous work will find plenty to like, particularly as he plays in a blank check-funded, souped-up sandbox.
Again and again in the film, fellow crew members ask Mickey a question only he knows the answer to: What is it like to die? It’s a question that he’s completely uninterested in acknowledging, finding his quite singular experience humiliating at best, one that makes him a total freakshow at worst. Bong, as an auteur, is much more interested in what it’s like to live. If humans are replaceable, cogs in the machine of capitalism, then what is living even for? If there will always be the haves and the have-nots, if the divide between them only grows, and if the divide is harder and harder to cross, then why bother? Mickey is fighting to live while waiting to die, but it takes a while for him to realize what exactly he’s fighting for. He’s standing up against tyranny on behalf of humankind, but does he even count as human? They are questions about what makes us us, what the point of it all is, and how long it’s going to last — questions we all have pondered in one way or another, just with less of a sci-fi bent. Maybe we have some of those answers, but questions like, ‘What is it like to die?’ will have to remain unknown — for now.
Mickey 17 has a run time of 2 hours 17 minutes, and is rated R for violent content, language throughout, sexual content and drug material.
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