Mickey 17 review: A sci-fi epic portraying a dystopian future with multiple Robert Pattinsons!

A human printing machine, an alien attack and a cult leader abusing his power, Bong Joon-Ho’s Mickey 17 takes us on an unexpected journey to an eerie planet!

Mickey 17 review: Academy award winning director, Bong Joon-Ho, who is best known for his movie ‘Parasite’, returns with his next project nearly six years later. This time around, he gives us a sci-fi thriller, which holds a cracked mirror of reality to our current scenario. ‘Mickey 17’ is based on Edward Ashton’s novel ‘Mickey 7’. It stars Robert Pattinson as the leading man and his effort to play this character to the best of his abilities makes him the most delightful thing about this movie. 

He plays the titular character ‘Mickey Barnes’, a hapless, poor and foolish man who tries to run a business with his best friend Timo (Steve Yeun), and ends up losing money to loan sharks. To escape getting killed by them, the both of them just blindly sign up for a dangerous interplanetary expedition so that they get to escape Earth and take the first spaceship out to another planet. The expedition is headed by a politician turned cult leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), who wants to build a ‘planet of purity’, where he can be the ultimate dictator and push religion on people. He has his first lady Ylfa (Toni Collette), right by his side but sometimes it feels like she is really the one running this whole show. Mickey foolishly signs up to be an ‘expendable’ on this expedition without quite reading or understanding the terms and conditions. An expendable is basically someone who they will carry various different fatal experiments on in space and each time he dies, his body is disposed of and a new one is bio printed with all his memories and personalities intact. So far, Mickey has been re-incarnated 17 times, and out of all the Mickeys, we get to know Mickey 17 the best. 

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During this unimaginable journey, he meets Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a fellow crew member who falls in love with him. She becomes his ultimate support system there. She is with him through his happiest and his lowest moments during the expedition and loves him the same each time he comes to her as a new version of himself. You see Mickey falling out like garbage from the printing machine so often that both him and you get used to it. But just when you find your sweet spot in a Bong Joon-Ho film, he brings in something unexpected. On one of his many experiments, Mickey discovers these weird creatures who have fangs for a face, but instead of eating him, they save him and send him back to where he came from. Mickey goes back only to find out there was another version of him, Mickey 18, already printed due to a miscommunication. Hence he finds himself in the middle of a situation where all versions of him could be deleted forever.

Mickey 17 makes many satirical points throughout the story. Kenneth Marshall feels like a parody version of Trump. His ideologies and words make him lose the election and hence he feels the need to dominate a world of his own where no one can enter without his permission. While he enjoys steaks, the expedition employees cannot gain one extra calorie and have to be happy with a gray paste that they’re given for their meals. It also directly points at tech personalities like Elon Musk who do not believe in working towards issues like climate change because he feels that the future of humankind is moving to another planet. Rather than working on dire issues on Earth, Kenneth just takes off with a bunch of people to pose a threat to another planet as well. Through Mickey's reincarnations, Joon-Ho also tries to portray how the common man is torn between work, deadlines and managing inhuman amouts of tasks, but still has to come back with a new attitude each day. Unfortunately, we don't have bio printing machines if stress quite literally takes our lives!

Mickey 17’s new clone, Mickey 18 feels like his alter ego, which is also something that exists in all of us. We have a voice in our head that’s much darker than our real personality, the one who pushes us to fight back, to stand up for ourselves, or sometimes even make us do things we usually wouldn’t even think of. Mickey 18 is that evil twin we all want but would shiver when we'd deal with them. But the real theme here that Bong Joon-Ho spends the least amount of time on is actually the concept of death itself. Mickey has died 16 times! That’s an insane number of times to feel pain and come back to life at the same time. Timo asks Mickey in a scene, "What does it feel like to die?" and you are curious about the same as a viewer. Is there an after life? Does he remember it when he comes back? Is he as clueless as all of us are? Or has he just gotten rather desensitized to it after taking the plunge so many times? These parts are so fascinating that, as a viewer, you want to know more.

Mickey 17 focuses more on the fiction than the science and, believe it or not, that worked for me pretty well. Nolan’s space sci-fi Interstellar was one for the science geeks and Bong Joon-Ho’s optimistic space sci-fi is for people like me who like to keep things light and entertaining. Having said that, it definitely isn’t his best work as compared to his Oscar winning films ‘Parasite’ and ‘Secrets of a Murder’ but surely is an off beat, unconventional and visually pleasing story to be reckoned with on the big screen!

Mickey 17 is currently playing at a theatre near you!

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