Mickey 17 (2025) Brilliantly Bonkers Black Comedy from Bong Joon Ho
“Well, it’s nice knowing you. Have a nice death. I’ll see you tomorrow”
Mickey 17 is an intriguing blend of the absurd to the dystopian, horror to the blackest of comedy and much more besides and often all within the time frame it’s taken you to read this simple opening sentence and perhaps this is why it tweaked my interest for a Bong Joon Ho film that I could finally love at first sight. Snowpiercer in 2013 is just too dystopian even for my cynical eyes and for the eyes you dare not believe for the horrific future we’re heading towards like a speeding off the rails and out of control train. I liked Okja four years later (but still struggle to love it) and two years later still I left the cosy confines of my local cinema after watching Parasite with my beautiful son who was as befuddled as I was as to what we’d just sat through.
Mixing social satire with bone crunching dark comedy, an eye on our dystopian future and a finger pointing squarely at the absurdity of placing any trust whatsoever in jingoistic tub thumping populist and autocratic leaders masquerading as latter day Christ like saviours, Bong Joon Ho’s latest creation is not a particularly easy film to love, but I do, and for many of the following spoiler avoiding reasons. You have a love story at its beating central heart and two stellar performances from Robert Pattinson as a child-like simpleton resigned to his death and rebirth cycle of life and Naomi Ackie as a security agent as well as an agent provocateur and an agent of ever lasting love. Pattinson has an obvious dual role but it could be argued that even this is trumped by Ackie’s singular but ever changing role and whilst Steven Yeun is dependably brilliant as always (as well as adding to the comedy quotient provided by Pattinson), Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette almost steal the show with their utter absurdity and crushing realism of a mirror to the banality of the people who populate our televisions for their own empty headed satisfaction. A husband and wife tag-team of vacuity, Toni Collette’s “Ylfa Marshall” is the real power behind the empty throne of her failed politician husband, prone to exclaiming “RUDE!” without further need for explanation as to why and has one of the funnier lines of the film as she describes the alien monsters or “creepers” as looking like “croissants dipped in shit”. Then we have her husband “Kenneth Marshall” and Mark Ruffalo on camp form as a cross between the egotistical psychological operation that is Elon Musk and his harebrained schemes of colonising other planets in the universe, and Donald Trump, the survivor of an assassination attempt no less…and of course the thoroughly repugnant line of wanting to create a “pure white planet full of superior people”. Away from Musk and Trump, I also saw Ruffalo’s performance as akin to Gary Oldman in Luc Besson’s Fifth Element and within a film that I saw obvious echoes back to Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer and Okja and any movie in space you care to name but especially Duncan Jones’ Moon from 2009. All plus points in my movie black book!
Then of course we have the planet name of “Niflheim” which is only a hop, skip and literary jump from Nephilim and we could dive into the dark and mysterious waters of conspiracy thinking here or indeed a mainstream take on the giants on “fallen ones” of the bible, or we could just continue with my dissection of the first 8 minutes of the film and leave the rest to your imaginations?
From a pitch black screen we dissolve to a frozen to the bone “Mickey Barnes” or the current iteration of his life as an “expendable” and easily and constantly reprinted life form “Mickey 17” (Robert Pattinson) breathing heavily and in distress after falling through a crevice in the snow to a valley deep below the surface of an ice planet soon to be revealed as “Niflheim”. Wiping the frozen condensation from his snow goggles before quickly removing them, Mickey is barely alive and in all reality shouldn’t be alive as “AD 2054 — PLANET NIFLHEIM” roots us again in his current unreal reality, as does a quickly moving camera shot upward to the thin cracks in the planet’s surface allowing daylight into his now snowbound coffin as Mickey’s narration come innermost thoughts, begin:
“How did I survive that? That was some damn fall. Oh shit. My comms busted. My thermals busted too. I should have got snapped in half and died on the way down, instead of slowly turning into a meat popsicle”
Through the cracks in the surface above we see a glimpse of a spaceship approaching as Mickey calls out for help and quickly his friend and colleague from their long ago days on earth “Timo” (Steven Yeun) appears with a disquieting yet obvious question: “You haven’t died yet?”. We cut to Mickey laughing at his predicament as Timo abseils into the crevice but only as far as his rope will allow and only halfway towards his stricken friend far below him. Collecting Mickey’s gun, Timo jokes “They’re going to reprint you back up tomorrow anyway” before asking the question Mickey has clearly been asked a thousand times in his many different incarnations: “Hey Mickey, what’s it feel like to die?”. Frustrated with both the question and his desperate situation, he corrects his old friend that he’s actually Mickey 17 and not 16 before calling him a “jerk” for asking the question and “18, after this one”. Leaving his friend to an icy death and soon to be rebirth back on the ship, Timo cheerily departs with a “Well, it’s nice knowing you! Have a nice death! See you tomorrow”.
With Mickey still stranded and now all alone as he awaits a cold and miserable death, he spots a large alien creature (later named in the film as a “creeper”) and his narration/innermost thoughts continue:
“Oh great. Why not? Oh that’s a pretty big one. Hopefully I get swallowed in one go. I guess it’s better than freezing to death”
Returning to Mickey, partly in shadow and partly seen in the shards of daylight allowed by the cracks in the planet’s surface above him, we now cut to the huge creeper tumbling from another icy crevice before barrelling towards him, its mouth wide open…
“Or maybe not”
We cut to the inside of the mothership high above the planet below and another version of Mickey being reprinted inside a cylindrical scanner akin to a MRI machine. Nearby, a host of laboratory technicians are playing a table-top game with a single coin:
“They just print me out again every time I die. All my data’s saved and I just get a whole new body. They do all these kinds of regular uploads of memories and personality traits to be implanted back in my brain. That’s some crazy technology, man. They say it’s advanced. Very advanced. The whole body printing and memory transplanting thing, to be honest, it was so ridiculously ahead of its time that it caused so many ethical and religious blah, blah, blah, that it was actually banned on earth and they’re only allowed now in outer space, on expendables. Like me. So from the second we left the atmosphere they made me work my ass off on the way to this planet. Give me one mission after another”
Throughout the above narration, Mickey has been seen, and will continue to be seen, in his truest guise as an expendable. Now on a space walk outside of the ship, he is currently a floating experiment in the appalling effects of radiation on the human body. Following a cut to the gigantic spaceship he and the crew have called home for over four years amid a slow crawl through space first patented and showcased in the early Star Wars films, we return to Mickey once more as he’s peppered with medical questions as to whether his skin is burning, is he going blind yet and does he feel at the brink of death yet as “That’s the real nut we’re after”. Now asked to remove his glove, his hand instantly dissolves from his wrist as the watching technicians in the space ship squeal with delight as to the ongoing success of their living experiment. Mickey’s dismembered hand now floats past a window on the ship as oblivious fellow crew members relax, chatting and smiling over a cup of coffee.
We return once more to yet another printing and scanning of yet another Mickey and yet another soon to be living and breathing experiment. But this version of him is “special” he’s assured by a smiling laboratory technician and at only 15 minutes in duration, “out of all the Mickey’s, you will have the shortest life span yet…”
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.
Whilst you’re here I may as well brag about the release of my trilogy of recently self-published books. Beautiful covers eh! As the title(s) would suggest, this is my life at the movies or at least from 1980 to 2024, and in volume 1 you’ll find 80 spoiler free appraisals of movies from debut filmmakers, 91 of the very best films appraised with love and absent of spoilers from 1990–2024 in volume 2, and in volume 3 you’ll find career “specials” on Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino together with the very best of the rest and another 87 spoiler free film reviews from 2001–2024.
All available in hardback and paperback and here are some handy links:
"A Life at the Movies Vol.1" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.2" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.3" - link to Amazon