I have seen my share of action movies, monster movies, and, to my chagrin, horror movies, but seldom have I seen a movie that treated the human body so callously, so coldly, or so cavalierly as Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17.
In his first outing behind the camera since 2019’s Oscar-winning sensation Parasite, Bong has made a movie in which the body is something to be incinerated, frozen, and annihilated. A sci-fi satire, Mickey 17 arrives with all sorts of humanistic window dressing, but it is the most boldly antihuman movie to arrive on screens since the last installment of James Cameron’s abhorrent Avatar franchise.
The film’s fundamental nihilism is baked into its plot, which is taken from an Edward Ashton novel titled Mickey7. The regrettable Robert Pattinson stars as Mickey Barnes, a resident of Earth about 30 years hence. Seeking to evade shady business associates on his native planet, Mickey makes a hasty exit to outer space, where he embarks on a new career path as an “expendable.” These unfortunate souls have taken interstellar jobs with high fatality rates, but the upshot is that their memories, seemingly downloaded from their minds, can be implanted into an infinite series of freshly produced, or “printed,” bodies. By definition, the existence of a 17th Mickey implies that the previous 16 — including the original, “real” Mickey — have met most unfortunate ends. “I should have gotten snapped in half and died on the way down,” Mickey ruminates while lodged in a frozen cave — an example of what passes for wit in the painful comedic moments of this movie.
It is hard to imagine that anyone who has ever been sick or infirm, or spent any time in the company of those struggling with physical maladies in this vale of tears, would find amusing the notion that bodies can be destroyed and then magically reformed like Play-Doh. The film is a brutal slog, and by the time it wends its way to its unpersuasive, moralistic ending — in which “human printing,” already prohibited on Earth, is banned throughout the known universe — Bong has spent more than two hours exploiting, for nothing more elevated than sick entertainment, the various ways in which Mickey and other “expendables” can die.
This would be grisly enough, but Bong is also determined to make a social commentary on modern political life — or, at least, modern political life as it existed when the movie was in production in the dark ages of 2022 and early 2023. Having made his way to the planet Niflheim, Mickey finds himself operating at the direction of Commander Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a perpetually smiling, smugly prancing interstellar traveler who, in between overseeing the colonization of the planet, finds time to host a talk show in which he refers to a “big, beautiful” rock. Hmm, could Bong have been thinking of any particular former or future American president in directing Ruffalo’s profoundly annoying performance? This stretch of the film is dated in other ways, too. Marshall is accompanied at all times by his wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), who has the hairstyle and overall countenance of televangelist Paula White. Bong has devilish fun at the expense of Marshalls, who are not only presented as authoritarians but goofy religious charlatans, but how likely is some future theocratic governance of outer space really?
As an “expendable,” Mickey is asked to endure many bad deaths, up to and including dying to help develop a vaccine to combat a virus fatal to humans on Niflheim. But the film’s animosity toward the human race goes beyond making Mickey an object to be endlessly felled and revived. As it turns out, Niflheim is the home to oversized insects called Creepers, which move in swarms like buffalo but resemble, when seen up close, centipedes or millipedes. Yet it would be insufficiently woke for the Creepers to be objects of grossness, so Bong makes these nasty bugs something akin to an exploited indigenous population — so noble, in fact, that they spare the life of Mickey 17 (causing a glitch in the “printing” program that results in the simultaneous emergence of Mickey 18). Later, when Marshall overconfidently and haphazardly goes to battle against the Creepers, Bong leaves no doubt as to whose side the audience ought to take. The disgusting but virtuous Creepers are even capable of communication through a primitive translation device — a moment meant to be as heartwarming, apparently, as the alien-human musical communion in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Sadly, Pattinson, the star of the Twilight vampire movie series, seems to be operating under what I would call the Multiplicity principle: As in the uninspired, largely forgotten 1996 comedy that imagined cloned Michael Keatons as each bearing unique personalities, Mickey 17 gives us replicated Mickeys with distinctive character features — a critical mistake in its world building since the “human printing” process is supposed to render exact copies. Therefore, Mickey 17 is presented as modest and low-key, while Mickey 18 emerges as combative and hyped-up. Yet the decision to differentiate the Mickeys, in the ultimate expression of blank slatism, does little to alleviate the tedium of Pattinson’s rudderless, diffident performance. Once, many moons ago, Donald Trump tweeted advice to Pattinson about his relationship with Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart (“He can do much better!”). On the basis of this movie, the future president should have been counseling him about his choice of roles, not girlfriends. The limited but real farcical implications of Mickey 17 and Mickey 18, each interacting with the same girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie), are wanly underexploited.
For such a long movie, Mickey 17 is a deeply drab affair. The spacecraft on which the film takes place is ugly and uninspired, and Niflheim, with its abundant blizzardlike conditions, looks to have been shot on leftover locations from the Battle of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. The film displays little of Bong’s cinematic imagination, such as it is. But worse than its visual ugliness is its moral ugliness. The movie cannot conceive of life after death except through the superficial, indeed evil, means depicted here. “Expendables” such as Mickey have eternal life to the extent that the human person is nothing more than a revivable body and downloadable thoughts. Although the denouement halfheartedly renounces “human printing,” this film has no concept of the human soul. It stands as a grave and worrying artifact of our soulless age. “It’s terrible dying. I hate it no matter how many times I go through it,” Mickey says at one point. We know the feeling.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.