Mickey 17 (2025)

Listen to this post:

In the day and age where sci-fi introspections on working class exploitation like Severance are all the rage, Bong Joon Ho (Parasite, Snowpiercer) seems primed to deliver his own eccentric critique of capitalistic exploitation that would fit snugly into his previous lexicon, only this time with his biggest budget ever. It’s unfortunate that Mickey 17 is a surprising misstep in an otherwise stellar record of insightful and timely works. Underdeveloped and more focused on its message than delivering an engaging story, the film ultimately fails at bringing any of its strongly held ideals to bear in any way that feel genuinely impactful or resonate.

via YouTube

Writer/Director Bong Joon Ho takes us into the far(ish) future where space travel is possible and cloning technologies, while illegal, are still used by less scrupulous types in the far reaches of the galaxy. Mickey 17 (Robert Patterson), is one of these clones. The seventeenth iteration of a man named Mickey who took the job as an “expendable” to run away from his debts on Earth with his best(ish) friend Timo (Steven Yun). While this setup is intriguing and hearkens to our own modern day examples of those seen as replaceable in the workforce like during COVID, instead of a fully realized creative premise providing a unique deconstruction, most of the movie’s direction feels muddled and undercooked.

The most glaring example of this issue can be seen in Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), who leads the Colony Expedition vessel Mickey is stationed on, playing a loud-mouth ignorant self-important caricature of a leader, the analogy so obvious I don’t need to say who it’s in reference to. His incompetence is clear from the beginning, his wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), constantly giving him notes and reminders during his speech like a doting mother. Their scenes together do elicit some laughs, but altogether their characterization feels too heavy handed, with bombastic personalities so hyperbolic, the dissection gets lost in the shuffle. And while some may consider this an accurate representation of real life that does not a good movie make.

Tonally, Mickey 17 is all over the place. One moment, it’s a love story, the next, an exploration of exploitative practices and dehumanization, then, an environmentalist/conservationist piece. The plot does only a decent job of connecting these themes, and as the third act begins, their tenuous connection only becomes more pronounced as conflicts and confrontations either feel forced or take on the vibe of an angry man screaming into the void. Mickey’s girlfriend and crew enforcer, Nasha Barridge (Naomi Ackie) carries much of this tonal inconsistency as one moment she’s a competent badass enforcer, the next a drug fueled sex crazed lover, the third is playing a mouthpiece for the obvious frustrations Bong Joon Ho has with the current state of the world.

This results in a massive disconnect with her and the many other characters’ stories which could have served as a solid foundation for the message he so clearly wanted to get across to audiences.

In the end, Mickey 17 is a victim of its own bloated yet underwritten vision that outgrew its premise. The more plotlines the film introduces, the less time we spend with any one idea or conflict. The CGI is passable but the creatures feel unimaginative and contrived like a poor man’s Avatar, which only hampers the film’s conclusion further. While fun at points, never reaches the lofty heights of Bong Joon Ho’s previous works and hopefully will only be remembered as a slight misstep in an otherwise legendary filmography.