It’s been a long old time – just over three years – since we last saw Robert Pattinson, possibly the most exciting actor of his generation, on the big screen, giving his excellent rendition of Batman. To make up for lost time, then, he’s got three films landing in 2025, starting here with Mickey 17, Pattinson teaming up with Bong Joon-ho in Bong’s first film since the world-conquering glory of Parasite pretty much earned him a blank cheque for his follow-up. He’s cashed in those chips big time here; Mickey 17 is exceptionally unlikely to turn a profit on its massive budget, a film as weird and personal as all of Bong’s lower-budget work, but also much lumpier and erratic than his best stuff.
Based on the novel by Edward Ashton, Mickey 17 is the sort of grimy, dystopian sci-fi that I’m sure we’re going to see a lot more of over the next four years as America’s future looks the bleakest it ever has. Pattinson takes on the title role, the 17th Mickey, as well as all of this Mickey’s predecessors and his single descendant, Mickey 18. See, Mickey is an ‘expendable’, someone who signs up to have their DNA and memories cloned and banked so that he can be killed and ‘reprinted’ constantly in order for a colony mission to the possible new human home planet of Niflheim to study the many ways to die both in space and on terra firma in this new world.
It’s a life he hates but is resigned to, brightened by his romance with expedition soldier Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who loves him in every incarnation even as he’s killed off by viruses, space debris, radiation, and more. Things change, though, when 17 is presumed dead after falling through Niflheim’s icy surface to its caves below – filled with the native species, an adorable bunch of furry tardigrade-looking things that have their own language – and reprinted into 18. As it turns out, the native ‘Creepers’ are actually very kindly and return 17 to the surface, turning him and 18 into ‘multiples’, a highly illegal way to be that sparks the beginning of a revolution against expedition overseer and very obvious Trump stand in Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo).
Pattinson’s dual performance is obviously the selling point here, and he is a lot of fun in both roles. You’re never confused as to which Mickey is which, Pattinson carrying himself so differently when he’s the meek and retiring 17 and when he’s the much more confident and violence-prone 18 (a minor glitch in the memory upload has made 18 a bit of a psycho). It’s hardly up there with his very best work in, say, Good Time or The Lighthouse, but he’s still incredibly endearing, always correctly modulating the goofiness.
For me, though, the film around him doesn’t do such a consistent job. This is mostly down to a lot of the comedy not landing that hard for me, more polite chuckles than real big laughs, which feels inadequate for a script this *broad*. Like all of Bong’s films, the tone here effortlessly flits between silly and serious without skipping a beat, I just found myself wishing that the silly stuff was funnier. Ruffalo and Toni Collette (as Marshall’s wife and advisor Ilfa) get the brunt of this – I mostly found their MAGA-adjacent performances unfunnily grating.
In fact, outside of Mickey himself/themselves, your favourite characters are likely to be the native Creepers. Returning to the themes and visual ideas that Bong explored in his Netflix anti-meat parable Okja, they are bouncy and lovable and just filled with personality, as are most of the incidental details of this world. The design work of the human habitation is perfectly depressing, from the grotesque food to the industrial, never-really-clean vibes all the living quarters give off, and it’s hard to not get excited to see the Mickeys, Nasha, and their Creeper buddies fight back against it all.
Though all the big set-pieces are super-solid, Mickey 17 does rather get in its own way a lot – a lot of sequences struggle to find a consistently compelling rhythm. The most egregious example of this is a baffling excursion right in the final scene that just saps the energy and emotion of the climax for no discernible gain, but it mostly manifests in smaller ways, though Bong does keep things moving at a decent enough pace that this is an issue mostly confined to single scenes rather than the story as a whole.
Originally due out almost a full year ago, there have been rumblings of a bit of a post-production nightmare for Mickey 17 (something Bong has already battled with Snowpiercer back in 2013). Upon seeing the finished product, though, these seem like exaggerations – this is a Bong film through and through and, while I can’t say it all works for me, any time you’re able to see an auteur shine through a nine-figure budget it’s a hopeful and joyous thing.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 