Warner Bros. Pictures
This review is cross-posted from Bloomberg Pursuits. Special thanks to my editor, Justin Ocean.
“Hey Mickey, what’s it feel like to die?”
The title character of Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s silly-serious sci-fi satire, his follow-up to 2019’s Oscar-winning megahit Parasite, gets this a lot. He’s an expendable, a person so desperate for work he’s agreed to be endlessly “reprinted”—and endlessly killed doing super-risky jobs. When Timo (Steven Yeun) asks this question, Mickey (Robert Pattinson) is lying on his back at the bottom of an ice pit. Looking up at his best friend, who’s dangling a rope that’s just too short to reach him, Mickey sighs and furrows his brow. There’s no time for metaphysics; a gruesome, hungry-looking alien has just turned up.
Bong has described Snowpiercer (2013) as his “hallway” movie: While the rich live it up at the front of the apocalyptic film’s speeding train, the poor try desperately to escape the squalid caboose. Parasite is his “stairway” movie: The wealthy loll about in a modernist temple on top of Seoul’s highest hill, while the have-nots, trapped in a filthy basement apartment in the valley below, scheme their way to the top. Let’s call Mickey 17 the director’s “trash chute” movie, serving up an even more brutal metaphor for societal inequality. Over and over, his hero kicks the bucket and gets thrown into a molten furnace of organic goo, only to be spit out anew for another go at torture and humiliation.
Bong’s film is hilarious as it explores Mickey’s unusually repetitive existential crisis, as well as a raft of other subplots and questions that touch on everything from climate degradation to animal cruelty to techno-authoritarianism. But in the end, Mickey 17, like its multitudinous hero, tries to be too many movies at the same time. And one of those movies—about a cruel, narcissistic politician—many filmgoers won’t be in the mood to watch.
For its first hour, Mickey 17, adapted from a 2022 novel by Edward Ashton, unfolds as a droll office comedy. In 2054, with the Earth lashed by dust storms and opportunities beckoning from the final frontier, Mickey signs up to work on a spaceship heading to colonize Niflheim, a distant, frozen world. (It’s named for an icy realm in Norse mythology, if that matters to you.) He’s a sort of handyman—and if he happens to lose a hand on the job, no biggie. Need to check the radiation level, or test a new vaccine, or check for predatory lifeforms? Send Mickey. Pattinson is marvelously funny in the part, evoking Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin as he takes pratfall after hilarious, fatal pratfall.
Amid its tangle of plots and huge cast of bizarre characters, the film offers all the satirical delights of Bong’s best work, especially the sudden tonal shifts the South Korean auteur is known for: He veers back and forth between goofy farce and suspenseful thriller, tossing off acid observations about injustice and exploitation along the way. There’s even a touching bit of romance. When Mickey and Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a sweet security guard, meet-cute one day in the cafeteria, Bong cuts out the dialogue; we might be watching Chaplin fall for Paulette Goddard in Modern Times.
Like Pattinson, Ackie is a fearless performer, sinking her teeth into action and comedy scenes alike. When a second, harder-edged Mickey accidentally turns up—because of course he does!—Nasha skips right past the Dostoevskian implications. She can’t contain her delight as she scrawls their numbers on their chests. Seventeen will be mild Mickey, she decides, and Eighteen, habanero.
Production designer Fiona Crombie and cinematographer Darius Khondji help realize Bong’s gloriously bleak world perfectly. But the crowning joy of the film is the aliens. Longtime collaborator Jang Hee-chul designed the “creepers” as squeaky roly-polies that grow to the size of elephants. Let me avoid spoiling anything and simply say: They contain multitudes.
Perversely, just when Mickey 17 should explode—once the ship arrives at icy Niflheim and Mickey’s double is on the loose—it hits a wall. One reason Parasite worked so well as an indictment of modern life is that the director implicated everyone, the villains and the victims; the system, ultimately, was to blame for the plight of all the characters. Not so, this time around. Because his villain is Donald Trump.
Not literally. Yet the cartoonish Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a shady businessman turned corrupt politician, might as well be. He’s got a venal, grasping wife (Toni Collette) and a bald Stephen Miller-esque cheerleader (Daniel Henshall). He’s plotting to build a perfect society on Niflheim, which conveniently is already a “pure white planet.” There’s even a fawning crowd in ugly red hats following him around.
Ruffalo, still the unrepentant ham he became for 2023’s Poor Things, is delightfully weird in the part. Likewise for Collette: Her Ylfa is maniacally fixated on power—and finding the perfect tasty sauce. (“Sauce is the true litmus test of human civilization,” she exclaims.) They’re both hilarious, or they would be if there was anything funny about Trump anymore. Worse, Bong never offers even a moment of empathy for the couple. He should have taken another page from Chaplin, whose Hitler stand-in in The Great Dictator gets that perversely lovable, childlike moment dancing with a balloon globe. The baddie in Mickey 17 is supremely ridiculous, but he’s never vulnerable.
Even with this great cast, transported to this wacky world, it’s hard to take pleasure in the conflict onscreen when the current conflict offscreen in Washington is so fraught. Moviegoers bring their politics into the megaplex, after all. What will they be watching? A grim revenge fantasy? Mean-spirited liberal propaganda? More polarizing noise? Mickey 17 is reaching theaters about four years too late—or early, depending on your point of view.
This shaggy smorgasbord from our greatest satirist may well be a classic someday. But in this turbulent winter of 2025, the sauce is too heavy.
When the absurdity of real life outpaces fiction, even the best satire starts to feel like a rerun.