Mickey 17 Review

A Redditor's Morality Tale

Not very often do you see me in the movie theaters. It’s a hit or miss experience, although depending on the movie the experience of being taken out of the world (or at the very least your living room) for the sake of immersion certainly has its benefits. The movie theater location certainly helped when watching the last to Robert Eggers’ movies I’ve seen, that being The Northman and Nosferatu. This time I went with a friend, one of those guys who can’t stay off twitter despite deactivating his old account and YouTube Channel, a loveable chud if you will. At his request we went the theater not too far from my place and purchased two tickets for Mickey 17.

My viewers’ superchat money paid for that ticket and popcorn, so as I suffered you too will have to suffer through my review.

Directed by Bong Joon-ho, the man behind the 2019 Academy Award winning Parasite, Mickey 17 provides a tour-de-force of a redditor’s morality tale, complete with sex, an overabundance of the word “fuck” and dangers of shady cult like leaders right down to the red hat. Unlike Parasite, where you could walk away from the movie knowing that poor people are generally evil, Mickey 17 simply leaves you walking away knowing that if you embrace your inner soyjak you'll find (to your horror) Naomi Ackie attractive. It’s not particularly a good movie at all, and once again I was left wondering if the novel it was based off Mickey 7 was worth reading at all to begin with if this is what the adaptation was reduced to. Bong has one good film (and it’s not even Parasite) but even the technically well-done Parasite leaves you walking into a movie with such tonal and technical differences that the whiplash will leave you internally decapitated in your reclined theater chair.

I’ll start with some positives (there aren’t that many.)

1. Robert Pattinson

Robert Pattinson continues to add to his resume a list of great acting performances, and his ability to main two different personalities on screen and play off of himself (both figuratively and literally) is one of the main reasons to watch this if at all, but the best scenes and performances he gives in this movie will eventually be put into meme-able edits that will allow you to skip most of the movie entirely.

2. Steven Yeun

Man does he do a good job at playing a manipulative asshole. Steven’s down quite well for himself from the Walking Dead to Invincible, and while playing a supporting role, his voice and his acting sticks out with every scene he’s in. He’s incredibly hate-able in his performance, which makes the film somewhat more bearable.

If I were to list a third, I would say the question of mortality and the morality behind the “expendables” (more on that later,) but it it’s missed out save for a short monologue by Mickey 17 about being afraid. For a science fiction dark comedy about repeatedly dying just to be printed right back out the next day, the question of mortality, being able to die repeatedly with the knowledge you’ll come back is not really addressed at all. Yes there are numerous times in the movie where characters ask Mickey “what is it like to die?” That’s a fantastic question to ask, one that cuts to the very core of the human condition and our fear about death and the constant reminder of our own mortality when we see traffic accidents to see the blood on our fingers from papercuts. Yet the morality tale in this dark comedy (life has meaning, beware sketchy cult leaders, etc.,) will be missed for the over-the-top, so on your nose political satire that I doubt the “Media Literacy” crowd will go after this one.

Mickey and Timo (Pattison and Yeun) find themselves on a colony ship on a five year journey to a distant planet, in order to avoid dying after going into debt with a shady criminal figure who has a penchant for LiveLeak style cartel chainsaw videos. The film’s in your face political parody is front and center with a failed congressional candidate (played by Mark Ruffalo) leading a “all pure” colony ship to a far off world, with religious fanatics (and a Church/Corporation) adorned with Red Hats and a cultish obsession with their dear leader. It was laughable, so out of place and out of touch, especially as we soon learn that Ruffalo’s character is an absolute moron being led by his manipulating and sauce obsessed wife. The dialogue throughout the entire film is atrocious, as if you were to ask Grok to write a screenplay of Mickey 7 but with vocabulary of your average redditor.

Mickey 17, who narrates for the audience giving us vital context and backstory, is a loser. I’d imagine some of this is due the 16 past lives dying in the worst ways possible, such as being used to test the effects of cosmic radiation on the body to the way to being a testbed for vaccinations against xenopathogens. I’ve always heard growing up that medical science was unfortunately advanced by leaps and bounds from what was learned by various camps and war research during WWII and The Cold War. However true that is, the film doesn’t leave you asking questions about the morality of having a man who cannot technically die as to how he could be used as a living testbed for medical science. Despite my own sense of morals, I know that a committee somewhere within my own government would be using this technology to test weapons, g-forces, and other unfathomable experiments just because the opportunity is there and our enemies would do it too. In the world of the film, there are countless people on the colony ship that aren’t die hard fanatics of Kenneth Russell (Ruffalo) and go just to get off world. There’s a throwaway exposition line about “anti-expansionists” which gives the impression that the earth isn’t doing so well. The journey is met with strict regulations on calorie limits, duties, hierarchy, and even bans on sexual intercourse (which is comedically ignored.) Mickey falls in love with and is in a relationship with Nasha, a security officer played by Naomi Ackie. I could definitely live without the sex scenes, and the ongoing trend of a nebbish white guy with a dominant female isn’t absent either. To give Nasha some credit, she is the definition ride-or-die. Throughout the many lives of Mickey she’s with him in his suffering, comforting him as he succumbs to various tests and diseases. That’s probably her best and most redeeming feature when every other word out of her mouth seems to be “fuck.” Naomi Ackie is 32, fitting into the very millennial coded trends of being with someone, fucking around and just getting high, but she is at least incredibly loyal.

The morality play of printing out another person is laughably trotted out through the comedy. I’m left wanting to read the book to see if the dark comedy of the film is Bong’s intent or purposefully in there. My money is on the latter, which only leaves the film I want to be left in the questions I’m asking about this world rather than what’s on screen. Rather than interrogating the ideas or the questions the audience might ask about the world of Mickey 17, I’m taken on a slapstick body horror comedy show that feels very out of date for 2025. This movie could’ve been made in 2005 or even 2015, but not now. There’s a distant echo of American Pie style comedy in here, especially with the sex that’s on screen that leaves you walking away confidently in the claim that all women are bisexual. For instance one of the female security officers engages with one of the tardigrade aliens native to the planet they’re colonizing (yes even the female cops are trigger happy in this world) which leads to a crack in the ice and kills her. One of the other females on the team is heartbroken, her lover dead, while the expendable Mickey gets to live another day or just get re-printed the next morning.

What could be an interrogation of death and the meaning of life when you can cheat death is skipped for Mickey 17 (who had been left for dead and re-printed) who finds himself in the living quarters of Kai, the grieving female security officer, who attempts to seduce him even asking if his relationship is an open one. At this time we’re given a strange threesome scene where both Mickeys are engaging with Nasha, including some literal playing with themselves imagery. It overstays its welcome, only for more political satire as the lucky winners of having dinner with their Dear Leader Kenneth Russell has Kai and Mickey 17 testing new sauces and food while Kenneth praises Kai for her genes and medical records for a “pure colony world” only for the grieving lesbian to ask “Am I just a Uterus to you sir?” Couldn’t be a more Biden era film if you asked for it.

Themes of anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism and religion are played all throughout the film, as the rising tension between the sentient tardigrades called Creepers and the Human colonists. At the same time, the two Mickeys, 17 and 18 have to deal with each other and learn how to avoid being summarily executed for creating a “Multiples Scenario.” Mickey 17 is the nebbish loser character who is used to being walked on, while Mickey 18 is assertive, dominant, and more traditionally masculine. You don’t have to see the movie to know which one of these two survives to see the end of the movie. Loanshark drama remains a small subplot, but even then the main conflict arises when Russell is doing a Late Night TV style broadcast when two of the small creepers are found in a rock sample that he has cracked open on live on the air. One is summarily executed and the other captured for study, which brings the conflict between Russell’s team and the Creepers to a head.

Russell’s own incompetence and pride leads him to push for a nerve gas solution to the Creepers, while the science team sneaks Mickey 17 a translation device to talk to the Creepers in order to negotiate some sort of settlement, with it being a life for a life. A dead human to make up their lost kin. While plenty of drama and conflict ensues with terrible dialogue to boot, Mickey 18 takes on Russell’s televised charge before sacrificing himself to take out Russell and preventing the release of the nerve gas. Mickey 17 gets to live, the Colony administration is transferred over to more competent (and notably Korean) hands, and Nasha is elected to higher office with Mickey maintaining his low status position while supporting his girl-boss of a girlfriend.

When the credits rolled, my friend and I were exchanging ideas trying to brainstorm what kind of punchy one sentence remark we could send out via tweet. Some of you saw that, “Reddit atheists discover life has meaning” or “Kill the gigachad inside of you to settle for a ship of mids.” Since seeing the movie my friend has told me the more he thinks about it, the more he finds himself liking it. Perhaps it’s one of those instances where you can enjoy something that’s so over the top about hating you that you end up liking it anyways (death of the author and whatnot.) I am not one of those guys, the more I think about it the more I don’t want to recommend this movie, and that Bong’s best film isn’t even in English. While it was certainly nice to get out and do something with a friend, you can certainly spend your time watching a better movie than Mickey 17.