by Tim Gordon
Bong Joon Ho’s return to science fiction with Mickey 17 is as ambitious and genre-bending as you’d expect, but this time, the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s sharp social satire and dark comedy don’t quite gel into a fully satisfying whole.
Based on Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7, the film follows Robert Pattinson’s hapless “Expendable” Mickey Barnes, a disposable human clone sent on suicidal missions to help a spaceship colonize the frozen world of Niflheim. Bong brings his trademark sense of absurdity and class critique to this bleak setup, packing the film with grotesque corporate greed, ecological dread, and moral duplicity.
The first act, set in the claustrophobic corridors of a spaceship as Mickey’s deaths pile up, bristles with tension and bleak humor. Pattinson leans into the duplicity of playing multiple Mickeys, giving each clone a slight edge of desperation or rebellious spark. The supporting cast, including Naomi Ackie as love interest Nasha and Steven Yeun as Mickey’s shady best friend Timo, helps ground the story’s more outlandish sci-fi concepts.
But by the time the plot doubles down on its “Multiples” twist with Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 plotting to outwit both their human handlers and each other, the film’s narrative momentum fractures. Bong’s direction is visually clever but can’t quite disguise a story that feels stuck in first gear, repeating existential dilemmas and moral lessons without pushing them to any new extremes.
Moments of biting dark comedy, like Mickey’s hallucinatory dinner with the expedition’s power-hungry leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, delightfully smarmy), shine with the director’s signature style. Yet other subplots, including a bizarre attempted seduction and an alien species that seems thematically underdeveloped, feel like they belong to a rougher draft.
Visually striking and frequently intriguing, Mickey 17 is never dull, but it struggles to balance its bleak absurdity with the emotional heft that made Snowpiercer and Parasite so potent. For fans of Bong Joon Ho’s world-building, there are flashes of brilliance here, but they’re buried beneath an uneven script and a concept that wears thin well before the credits roll.
In the end, Mickey 17 is an expendable experiment in itself, smartly conceived but only partially realized.
Grade: C+
