<em>Mickey 17</em> Is Sad, Strange—And So Much Fun

Poor, poor Mickey Barnes. The protagonist of the film Mickey 17 lives a grim existence as an “expendable,” a worker aboard a spaceship whose only job is to die repeatedly for the sake of human progress. Mickey, played by Robert Pattinson, is subjected to lethal viruses, exposed to radiation, and asked to sit in a chamber of nerve gas, just so he can report on his own deterioration until he loses consciousness. Sometimes, he’s not even dead when they toss his body into the incinerator that melts him into organic goop—goop that’s then fed back into the MRI-like machine that can print a new copy of him, so he can go through all of that again.

Yet if Mickey’s life is suffocatingly bleak, Mickey 17 is anything but. Rather, it’s a wacky, satisfyingly strange romp that further reaffirms Bong Joon Ho as a singular filmmaker. The director isn’t the kind to tell a one-note sci-fi story; his previous genre efforts, such as 2013’s Snowpiercer and 2017’s Okja, work well because of their elasticity, juggling the comedic with the macabre, the absurd with the serious. Based on a novel by Edward Ashton called Mickey7, Bong’s adaptation is his first major Hollywood studio project and his most expensive movie to date, budgeted at nearly $120 million.

The price tag shows: The world building is extensive, involving large-scale sets and impressive visual effects, and the cast features superstars and character actors alike. Yet Mickey 17 feels intimate at the same time; it carefully studies a protagonist whose morality transcends his physical being. That such sentimentality can come across in a story as disturbing as Mickey’s may sound illogical. But, as Bong told my colleague David Sims in 2019, “I always feel it’s more fun when I try to convince the audience of something that doesn’t make sense.”

[Read: How Bong Joon Ho invented the weird world of Parasite]

Not much of Mickey 17 makes sense at first blush. Set in the year 2054, the film takes place largely on an icy planet called Niflheim, where a fascist politician named Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, doing the absolute most) and his equally outrageous wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), have landed in hopes of establishing a colony. Niflheim, though, seems uninhabitable, so the couple, their supporters, and their employees—some of whom are petty criminals fleeing Earth—remain aboard their docked ship, turning it into a compound. Mickey is the crew’s guinea pig; after getting into trouble with a loan shark, he signed up to be expendable in order to escape certain death. (That he applied for a role requiring him to die anyway is mainly because he failed to read the job’s terms and conditions. Again: poor, poor Mickey Barnes.)

The Marshalls treat Mickey like trash, despite the fact that he’s the sole person who can help advance science and finally establish their settlement. The film begins with the 17th copy of Mickey doing what he’s come to believe he does best—that is, dying—before hopscotching between the past and present to tell a deeper story: that of a group of people who think they’ve made a clean break from their pasts, only to discover how difficult achieving fresh starts can be. Amid it all, Mickey perishes over and over, until an accident causes two Mickeys to be alive at once.

This plot point allows Bong to slyly underline the way humans can repeat themselves. Many scenes echo earlier ones: Each Mickey falls for a woman named Nasha (Naomi Ackie), and each Mickey tends to passively accept his fate. The slimy ne’er-do-well Timo (Steven Yeun), who roped Mickey into the loan-shark snafu and had the same idea to run away into space, can’t stop making under-the-table deals. The Marshalls intend to make Niflheim what they call a “planet of purity,” where they can freely implement eugenic policies. But their expedition is full of already disgruntled workers; the same grievances they had back home are seeping into the ship’s confines.

[Read: Parasite and the curse of closeness]

Bong has circled similar themes in his other work, and any fan of the director’s films will recognize the shared DNA. Mickey 17’s examination of the cruelty of social stratification immediately brings to mind the Oscar-winning Parasite, while its depiction of the sexualized perversity of upper-class excess has hints of Snowpiercer. A subplot involving Niflheim’s indigenous creatures—roly-poly-like critters the Marshalls dub “creepers”—highlights the importance of environmental preservation, which made me think of Okja, Bong’s fable about factory farming. Mickey might as well be a human version of that film’s porcine titular character, a prized possession and a genetic marvel held captive by over-the-top totems of greed.

Bong proves to be precise as ever, though, which keeps the movie feeling distinct from his others. In Mickey 17, he creates images that are instantly memorable: During one of Mickey’s deaths, his body slams against a vehicle’s airbag in slow motion, glass shattering around his head. During another, his hand gets cut off and spins through outer space past one of the ship’s windows, droplets of blood trickling behind it. Every now and then, a fresh Mickey slips out of the regeneration machine and tumbles slickly onto the floor like a fleshy alien. Some of the more jarring sequences remain amusing despite their brashness: At one point, for example, Mickey narrates a shocking vignette—about a psychopath on Earth who printed multiple copies of himself to carry out grisly murders—with the resigned, wary tone of an office worker. That deliberate intensity keeps Mickey 17 engaging even as it swerves (sometimes messily) into its plentiful twists.

The film’s greatest asset, though, may be Pattinson. The actor’s delightfully offbeat performance anchors the story in an endearing humanity. His choices border on cartoonish—like the nasally, quivering voice he gives Mickey—but they’re specific enough to make his character’s plight feel recognizable. Mickey is the key to the expedition’s success and the dweeb next door—he also embodies the paradox at the center of the film: that quests for “purity” are fools’ errands, cosmic jokes that yield only more flaws, conflicts, and problems. Humans may forever seek self-preservation and perfection at any cost, Mickey 17 suggests, but what makes people human isn’t their body. It’s their soul.