Mickey 17 is a big middle finger to space-obsessed strongmen

The well-deserved hat trick that director Bong Joon Ho pulled off at the Oscars in 2020 with Parasite all but ensured that studios would fight tooth and nail to back his next cinematic project. It was always going to be difficult for Bong to top what he accomplished with Parasite — a shapeshifting masterpiece of storytelling that spoke to the the meticulousness of his creative process — but it was hard not to look forward to his follow-up after such a powerful tale.

Though Mickey 17 bears many of the narrative and stylistic hallmarks Bong has become known for, the film is shakier than much of his previous work. There is an intentional (but not always effective) sweatiness to some of the dark comedy’s lead performances that takes some of the bite out of its social commentary. But considering the cartoonishly unhinged political climate we’re all living through right now, Mickey 17 also feels like a film that’s meeting the moment and articulating what’s on many of our minds.

Adapted from Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey 7, Mickey 17 tells the story of Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), a kind simpleton of a man whose iffy business dealings force him to run for his life. When Mickey and his best bud Timo’s (Steven Yeun) plan to open a bakery falls flat, they know that the sadistic loan shark they owe money to won’t think twice about murdering them. And in Mickey 17’s vision of the future, Earth has become so ravaged by catastrophic weather conditions that there aren’t that many places they can hide.

The climate is so unstable that many people have come around on disgraced politician Kenneth Marshall’s (Mark Ruffalo) plan to leave Earth in order to colonize other worlds. Unlike Timo, Mickey doesn’t have any specialized skills or connections that would make him an ideal candidate for Marshall’s voyage. But his willingness to sign up to become an expendable — a menial worker who gets cloned every time they die on the job — without reading the fine print is all it takes to secure him a spot and, seemingly, a path to safety.

Though there is a dreary, near-apocalyptic grimness to the world around Mickey when we first meet him, Pattinson leans into a charmingly slackjawed goofiness with his performance that makes it clear how comedic Bong intends for Mickey 17 to play. Mickey, whose whiny affect makes it seem a bit like Pattinson is riffing on aspects of Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock, isn’t entirely a guileless Pollyanna. Once he’s aboard the ship, Mickey can sense that there’s something very off about Marshall’s raw meat-obsessed wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) and his conniving yes-man Preston (Daniel Henshall). Mickey knows that Marshall — who reads like a blend of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Bryan Johnson — sees expendables as subhuman beings whose only value is in the labor they can do to realize his goals.

In Mickey’s case, that labor ranges from doing menial tasks within the ship to being sent outside it and ordered to take off his suit and give himself fatal radiation poisoning. There’s also a fair amount of deadly trial and error once the ship reaches the planet Nilfheim and Marshall’s scientists have to use Mickey to develop a vaccine to protect everyone from alien viruses. But no matter how many times Mickey is tasked with jobs that kill him, his 3D-printed clones always wake up knowing that security officer Nasha Barridge (Naomi Ackie) will be there with a smile on her face and plans for them to sneak off for some unsanctioned sexual release.

Mickey 17’s horniness and its moments of gore both underline that, on one level, it’s a film about people dealing with the real challenges that would come with deep space exploration. The giddy playfulness of Ackie and Pattinson’s romantic scenes speaks to how the hope their relationship gives them is a rare and precious feeling.

Even though they’re played for laughs, each of Mickey’s gruesome deaths work to reinforce how dangerous colonizing another planet would be and how the endeavor would not be possible without people believing in basic science. But each time Mickey is resurrected by way of a massive 3D printer that often plops him out onto the floor, you can feel Bong’s sense of humor shining through.

It’s also clear that Bong intends for Mickey 17 to leave you chuckling in moments when it’s focused on Marshall hamming it up for his red-hat wearing fans or pontificating to his workers as Ylfa flits around him like a deranged hummingbird. Though Collette’s performance is delightfully batshit — Ylfa’s always popping up with a blender trying to force people to try strange sauces she’s concocted — Ruffalo’s Marshall grows increasingly exhausting to watch as the film progresses. That energy is clearly intentional to some extent and understandable because of how Marshall is defined by his propensity for self-aggrandizement and throwing tantrums.

Especially when Ruffalo’s spitting out lines through chunky prosthetic teeth spiritually (but not aesthetically) evocative of the set Tilda Swinton wore in Bong’s Snowpiercer, Marshall feels like Mickey 17’s clearest articulation of how egotistical billionaires who see themselves as saviors tend to be assholes who should not be trusted. But Ruffalo goes so big with his performance that it often feels like he’s acting in a different, more absurd movie.

Things start to feel even zanier when the 17th Mickey seems to die on Nilfheim’s surface, only to find his way back to the landed ship cold, but very much alive. The way the movie — which was greenlit before Ashton’s novel was published, and based on early drafts of the book — glosses over how he doesn’t freeze to death is one of the first signs of how wobbly the story winds up getting. But the film needs that beat to introduce Mickey 18 and the troubles that ensue when two expendables exist at the same time.

While Mickey 17 uses its two Mickeys to explore some fun, but not all that novel, ideas about what cloning technology would mean for society, the film starts to lose its footing as it pulls the pair into uneven plotlines. The duo have their own existential baggage to deal with as they try to figure out why 18 is so much more aggressive and reactive than his twin. But they also have personal scores to settle with Timo. Then there’s the matter of working through an emotional rough patch with Nasha and making sure that other people on the ship don’t realize that there are two of them.

Bong does a serviceable job of keeping all those plates spinning, but they don’t quite balance in a way that makes Mickey 17 feel like his best outing. But that overall messiness is also part of what makes the movie — along with its central message about the responsibility workers have to value themselves — stand out as a perfectly timed story to this current moment, despite being set in the far future.

Mickey 17 also stars Holliday Grainger, Anamaria Vartolomei, Cameron Britton, Patsy Ferran, Angus Imrie, Steve Park, and Tim Key. The film is now is theaters.