Mickey 17, Bong Joon Ho’s first feature since 2019’s Oscar-winning Parasite, is based on a comic novel by Edward Ashton called Mickey7. The number refers to how many times Mickey (Pattinson), a grunt worker on a newly colonized planet, has died on the job and been “reprinted” to live another day. On the couch with Stephen Colbert last week, Bong was questioned why the number jumped from 7 to 17 in his screen adaptation. “So I kill him 10 more times,” the South Korean filmmaker replied with expert timing and infectious mirth.
You’ll find more of that timing, more of that mirth in his winning clone comedy; also: cynicism and romanticism, grand invention, some grody bits. (Repeat: Mickey must die 16 times to arrive at this 17th iteration. It gets messy.) A worker so unappreciated that his official job title is “Expendable,” Mickey – a sweetheart and a doormat – is nonetheless essential to the mission to colonize Niflheim. Need a vaccine? Try it out on Mickey first. How about some soldering work outside the spacecraft? Shove Mickey out the airlock. Mickey fell through a hole into a cavern on icebound Niflheim? Scrap the rescue: It’s easier to leave him to die and boot up a new version.
Only he doesn’t die right away, which is how a Mickey 18 gets printed while 17 is still kicking – a big ethical no-no – which occasions much slapstick as Pattinson gets to play off himself. The different Mickeys have some unique personality traits – turns out 18 has rage issues – but all of them speak in a kind of high-pitched, strangled voice, as if the former Twilight star is trying to strangle his heartthrob status too. Pattinson is fully committed to the performance – performances – and his impact subtly evolves from giggling to genuinely moving. That same evolution applies to the whole of Bong’s film, which dances so close to the edge of grand folly, the effect is exhilarating.
Everybody here is going for broke, from Naomi Ackie’s force-of-nature turn as Mickey’s lover to Mark Ruffalo as the mission’s rich-prick eugenicist leader, all veneers and fake tan, to Bong himself, nimbly snaking between class satire and creature feature. (The planet, by the way, is already inhabited by a highly intelligent native species that looks like Mr. Snuffleupagus crossed wires with Arrival’s heptapod, only more fang-y.) Genre hybrids are a hallmark of Bong’s filmography – from his home country canon of The Host and Parasite to English-language films Snowpiercer and Okja – and that anything-and-everything-goes philosophy is Bong’s secret sauce, so to speak. He’s used the giddy popcorn trappings of a thriller, an actioner, a horror film, to illustrate the chasm dividing the haves and have nots, the überpowerful and the proletariat. In the rousing Mickey 17, resistance most definitely is not futile: You just need numbers.
This article appears in March 7 • 2025.
