'Mickey 17' is Bonkers, Wildly Inventive, and Kind of Exhausting
Brilliant slapstick meets overcaffeinated storytelling in Bong Joon-Ho's ambitious muddle.
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If graded solely on quantity of great ideas, Mickey 17 is one of the best movies of the last ten years. And yet watching it is as infuriating as it is inspiring, as all those interesting ideas just sort of crowd each other out and reproduce with none getting the space to thrive. Just when I’d start to enjoy one idea it’s onto the next, all hooks with no development, a shouty place where my brain could find no purchase.
I think a lot of us are at a place where we just want to watch Robert Pattinson be a little weird. Between Good Time, The Lighthouse, and The King (and I’m skipping over quite a few here) he’s already played oddball muse for murderer’s row of auteurs from the Safdie Brothers to Robert Eggers and David Michod. And so, the timing of him teaming up with Bong Joon-Ho, director of Parasite, Snowpiercer, and Okja, seemed perfect. Mickey 17, which Bong adapted from Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, even seemed like an ideal vehicle, with Pattinson playing a down-on-his luck future debtor who signs up for the world’s shittiest version of immortality — all because he didn’t really read the fine print. I expect a lot of great sci-fi based on the premise of unread Ts and Cs, as all of us are increasingly at the mercy of techno-oligarchic Rumpels-stiltskin. Sorry you can’t sue us for killing your wife, it turns out you waived that right during this free Disney+ trial.
Strong start aside, eventually it becomes clear that maybe the goal of watching Robert Pattinson be the squinty little creep we’ve all come to love is actually at odds with a story with this many moving parts. Mickey Barnes, we learn in Mickey 17’s opening minutes, lost all his money on macaron shop venture along with his buddy, Timo (Steven Yuen). They borrowed some money from a sadistic loan shark that they couldn’t pay back, and since this heavy can supposedly find them anywhere on Earth, they decide to go to space. Luckily there’s a space colonization mission about to depart, led by a failed politician and his culty followers — the sweaty, inarticulate Marshall, played by Mark Ruffalo in big fake chompers. When Marshall can’t come up with a soundbite, which is often, he leans on his stage wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), who’s like a blonde Fox News bobblehead meats Suze Orman. She clacks her bejeweled fingers together and whispers something in his ear and then he says something even dumber.
Marshall and Ylfa are both hilarious based on initial vibe alone, and yet almost every time Mickey 17 needs to land a punchline, it fumbles and fiddles, leaving you scratching your head. There’s a consistent sense throughout that Bong’s Buster Keaton-level facility for visual comedy is being undercut by replacement-level wordplay.
Marshall and Ylfa are lot like the movie as a whole — initially intriguing, and two great characters played by two of our best actors, but so overreaching in scope and inconsistent from scene to scene that there’s no breathing room to just enjoy them. They’re sort of tech demagogues, possibly TV evangelists, and eventually some kind of foodie-coded space Mormons. If you can wrap your mind around that one, you’re a better audience than I. 90 minutes into the film, Ylfa, with no setup, becomes obsessed with sauce. Her life’s focus becomes creating new and delicious sauces, which is mostly neither here nor there vis-a-vis the rest of the movie, and sort of funny in a vacuum, but when you stack up ten plot devices like this with no obvious connection between them it just starts to get tiresome.
Right, so Mickey. While scammy Timo figures out how to finagle his way onto the ship as a landing craft driver thanks to some forged papers, honest rube Mickey is forced to volunteer for a job no one wants: an expendable, whose job is to perform the voyage’s most dangerous missions, dying and being reborn through 3D printing over and over, for however long it takes. What if the singularity was actually permanent indentured servitude?
The voyage to the ice planet Niflheim takes four years, and upon arrival, it’s Mickey’s job to test the atmosphere for killer viruses. He dies pukingly over and over until the science department eventually develops a vaccine in what is probably the film’s best squences. The slapstick of Mickey rolling out of the juddery human-printing machine like hotel toast is magical every time.
Before that, a ship full of migrants trapped together in a floating tin can for four long years naturally takes on a high school character. We’re given a few facts in this vein through Mickey, who speaks to us directly via voiceover throughout. Like that the crew is on a limited diet with every calorie accounted for, such that food takes on an outsized importance. So important, in fact, that Marshall and Ylfa ban sex on account of it burning too many useless calories. Mickey quickly flouts this ban with his new girlfriend, Nasha (Naomi Ackie) who is some kind of MP. They fuck and fuck and fuck some more, with the sex ban plotline ultimately coming (cumming?) to nothing.
Nasha’s main character trait is being horny for Mickey, and we never get much more by way of motivation. Most characters in Mickey 17 are like this, remaining either underdeveloped or existing as a collection of head spinning reversals. Marshall is often seen flanked by a man dressed as a giant pigeon. Sounds funny! Not that funny.
One of the most obvious dynamics one might expect to see explored in a movie like this is the one between Marshall’s true believers, his cultiest followers, and the other expedition members who, apparently like Mickey and Timo and Nasha, only signed on out of desperation or necessity. We get none of that, but Timo does eventually become a drug dealer. Even the basic question of whether there are other expendables besides Mickey is left unaddressed. Other characters refer to Mickey as “an expendable” or “one of the expendables” as if he’s part of a known class, but if there are others we never see or hear of them. Seems like that might’ve been an interesting contrast?
The plot eventually turns on a species of giant pill bug-type characters, who live under Niflheim’s ice. True to Mickey 17’s MO, the pill bugs are beautifully designed and inherently sort of wondrous, but what they actually want or represent in the story is left unclear. Mickey gets dragged away by the queen, but, unbeknownst to the rest of the expedition, not eaten, and eventually makes his way back to the ship. This leads to a dreaded “multiples” situation, not to mention a sort of a Multiplicity situation, when Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 turn out to have drastically different personalities. Also, maybe 17 can communicate with the pill bugs? Why they introduce this plot point only to later introduce an electronic “communicator” device that undoes it I have no idea, but most of Mickey 17’s last act is like that. Marshall wants to kill the pill bugs? Mickey 18 wants to… kill Marshall? Nasha wants to get double teamed? Ylfa wants… sauce?