MOVIE REVIEW: Mickey 17 (Dir. Bong Joon-Ho, 2025)
'The first sign of civilisation is sauce'
There was a point somewhere in the second half of Bong Joon-Ho’s new film, Mickey 17, where I was struck with a horrible sinking feeling that the film had completely fallen apart. I turned my head and the woman sat a few seats down from mine had turned her head away from the screen and fallen asleep. It was unclear how we arrived here as I reflected back on the joy I had felt watching the early stages of this delightfully strange sci-fi comedy. Robert Pattinson, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, and Steven Yeun, were still giving great performances, but nothing seemed to stick. In considering how I should approach writing this review, I have come to realise that what Bong Joon-Ho has created here is an elaborate knot that I must pick apart my small piece of. So let us dive into a film that left me feeling such an obstacle course of emotions culminating in a great big huff of disappointment.
Based on the novel of the same name by, Edward Ashton (which I have not read), the film follows the down and out and hunted by loan sharks, Mickey Barnes (Pattinson), who agrees to take part in an interplanetary colonial expedition on the condition that he becomes an ‘expendable’. Expendables are those who have given themselves over to a scientific process in which, when the expendable dies, a new clone body is printed and given the memories of the expendable. While this practice has been band on earth (due to the obvious moral and ethical implications), the leader of this voyage, the villainous populist figure, Kenneth Marshall (Ruffalo), has employed this technology for scientific study and to produce meat shields to face the dangers of interplanetary exploration first. By the time we see Mickey in the film’s opening scene, lying broken at the bottom of an icy ravine, he has died sixteen times and, by the look of the lifeforms approaching him, his seventeenth life is up. The boys in the lab have already fired up the printing machine and an eighteenth Mickey is being born. Marshall and his wife, Ylfa (Collette), are planning their grand, sauce-based, religio-political reign on the new world. And we’re left to wonder the nature of the self, the value of life and death, and what the human intergalactic expansion will look like when it’s led by human greed rather than human decency.
When I listened to Mark Kermode’s positive review of, Mickey 17, before I sat down to write this, and he kept emphasising how fluid the film is in its approach to genre and theme. It is an undeniably apt observation of how this film functions. Bong Joon-Ho has somehow managed to create a film which feigns like it will perform a Groundhog Day story, pivots into a wonderful play at something akin to Richard Ayoade’s under-seen gem, The Double (2013), all the while there’s this undercurrent that to me beautifully evokes Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). When the film is moving through this realm, I really believe in it. Pattinson switching between a trampish dimwit loser and a violent psychopath with the swish of his hair is an absolute treasure to see. I will not say a single bad thing against his performance here. Everything about the way he moves, the way he speaks, his whole manner on the screen is quite unlike anything you’ll probably see this year. He is the perfect manifestation of both, a crash test dummy made flesh and forced into Sisyphean absurdity, and the guy who has had enough and has nothing to lose. Where the film sags around Mickey is on the level of his romantic relationship with security officer, Nasha (Naomi Ackie). While I do not think Ackie gives a bad performance, I cannot say that I fully believe in the romance in action. Because I never felt there was a substantial depth to their relationship (sure, they have sex often and they share laughs in a montage, but it never grabbed me), the film’s most tender moment, which I shan’t spoil, missed me completely. It is a shame, in a film which is two and a half hour oil, that the time wasn’t given to fleshing out the romance between these two as the actors have great chemistry. Again, I’m reminded of the great Chaplin romances in, Modern Times, and in, City Lights (1931) in particular, and how they elevate and expand the emotional range of those films. Had this element worked for me, I imagine I would have navigated the film’s second half much better, but, given that I could never truly feel invested in this romance much of the emotion the second half of the film was lost.
As the film morphs into a more traditional science fiction fare. I mean this in the classical sense, a fiction which deals with (and, in this case, satirises) contemporary political issues through the lens of narratives containing advanced technology. Some negative critiques of, Mickey 17, will be very lazy in their discussion of this element and I want to distance myself from that as much as possible. I do not have a problem with how didactic, Mickey 17, is. The obsession with films which are about something needing to be ‘subtle’ about delivering its message is an infantile critique and one which will make me assume that the only film criticism you have ever consumed in your life is through YouTube videos. If I have to denigrate, Mickey 17, for being unsubtle then I would have to do the same to Godard, to Pasolini, to Mike Leigh, and to Ken Loach, which would be intellectual negligence of the highest degree. Others have discussed and highlighted many of the political elements of, Mickey 17, especially how it seems to be lampooning the imagery of the South Korean conservative movement with its emphasis on control over, and fetishisation of, female reproduction, something which is unfortunately the talk of the day amongst fascists worldwide. I was also thinking of the Unification Church’s (Moonies) infiltration of politics throughout East Asia. What people will be focusing on, however, is the way in which Mark Ruffalo’s portrayal of Kenneth Marshall is so obviously modelled on Donald Trump. While some people will be unkind and roll their eyes at this, and other, more moronic viewers, will be furious that it exists. Ruffallo is, whether you like it or not, pitch perfect in this role. He’s terribly funny and grotesquely dehumanising to others. You believe this man is stupid enough to believe that he can conquer the stars and bullish enough to develop his own cult of personality. If you say, ‘how can this barely articulate, openly craven, freak possibly accrue a following?’, I suggest looking put of the window and grasping reality by its ugly horns. Where the film starts to collapse as Marshall and his wife become its centrepiece is that their conflict with the indigenous species (which Marshall christens ‘Creepers’) is not very compelling. The Creepers are the insect-like, highly intelligent, species which inhabit the planet of Niflheim. Their design is quite uninspired, looking a lot like a giant woodlouse and they never inspire the kind of awe and wonder that I feel a film which involves humans encountering life in the cosmos for the first time should have. In short, Marshall wants to exterminate them and build his new settlement, and he his wife wants to use the Creepers to develop a new sauce. I feel like this pivot into a classical sci-fi humans vs creature, ‘but who is the real monster?’ is where the whole film sags down. It clashes with the comedy of the early half. It is not as integrated into the thematic through line on the nature of life and death as well as it could have been. It ultimately feels as though the writer just needed a thing to tie the narrative up once the interesting conceptual stuff had been wrung out and this was chosen and haphazardly stitched in. It simply isn’t the plot direction that I believe the film needed to go with in order to actualise its serious turn.
There are a few other side stories and subplots which are a mixed bag. Steven Yeun is wonderfully funny as Mickey’s friend Timo, who gets Mickey in trouble with gangsters on Earth after a business venture involving macarons go south. Unfortunately, he’s given so little to do in the film, which is a shame because you do want to keep seeing more of him. There’s the sympathetic doctor, Dorothy (Patsy Ferran), who we see does care about Mickey and the Creepers, but again lacks a lot of the character work required to make her feel like much more than wallpaper with a heart. There’s some political intrigue that is okay. Tim Key is dressed in a pigeon suit. Another woman is added into the fight for Mickey, but that feels flat (possibly intentionally as she is in love with a woman who died earlier in the film). I guess what I’m trying to say is that there is a lot going on in this film without much of it feeling substantial, despite its long run time.
I’m frustrated and exacerbated by, Mickey 17. Bong Joon-Ho is an incredibly talented filmmaker, with a back catalogue that can go toe-to-toe with many greats. In this instance however, for me personally, that magical element, his ability to move through genre and tone seamlessly and enthuse it with his own idiosyncratic sense of humour and pathos, did not hit the marks as it should have. I love individual moments, but not the whole. I would be more than happy to find myself proven on the wrong side of history here. But, my opinion on the day of my first viewing, is that, Mickey 17, is a perfect ninety minute sci-fi, Modern Times, stretched into a sagging two and a half hour adventure comedy drama with no stakes and no tension.
Ryan Sweeney (@thecautiouscrip/Insta: TeaWithZizek)
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