‘Mickey 17’ Review: It’s Robert Pattinson x 2 In Bong Joon Ho’s Hilarious, Humane & Thought-Provoking Satire – Berlin Film Festival
Although it is science-fiction to its core, director Bong Joon Ho’s first film since his Oscar-winning Parasite six years ago is in many ways a not-that-absurd look at where we just might be headed as a society.
Mickey 17 on its surface is about a hapless, slightly less than average macaroon chef who no longer can take Earth and its ever-so-decaying condition that has led thousands daily to board a spaceship to a more promising planet life — or so they think. Nevertheless, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is just a guy whose life is seen as expendable (a word he uses on his application), and like a lab rat, his new day job is — wait for it — dying. Yes, Mickey is part of constant experiments to help researchers see what causes death and disease, and so he is put through the ringer and reprinted repeatedly, dying over and over again, always being printed again to continue the process.
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To the narcissistic wannabe dictator on the ship, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), and his ambitious wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), Mickey is sub-human, dismissible and invisible, a cog in the wheel of their plans. Things move along, Mickey dies and dies and dies until, accidentally, he is somehow printed twice, and Mickey 18 comes into the picture, a person who sees things differently, wants a different life and serves as the flip side of Mickey 17’s conscience. The dynamic creates a real quandary as all of this puts Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 in harm’s way, a danger to the whole enterprise and one that must be done away with.
If you have seen the trailers for this ambitious sci-fi mind trip you know this is not cookie-cutter studio filmmaking but yet another brilliant and wildly original movie that can’t be compared to any other coming from a major right now. This one is from Plan B, which is always going for something different, and backed by Warner Bros betting on Bong’s track records, all those Oscars and a movie that might just find its audience with any luck. It premiered today at the Berlin Film Festival.
Pattinson is a revelation here, taking on both Mickeys, giving them distinct personalities and conflict, deadpan and dead, a hilarious performance that takes on new dimensions as the story progresses. This is clearly one of his best if not riskiest screen outings, and the actor delivers. As the kick-ass security agent Nasha, a woman who has a mind of her own and knows how to use it, Naomi Ackie hits all the right notes as she finds worth in Mickey, and later love. She is a necessary protector, and their relationship is as sweet as Mickey is a bit hapless. His best friend since they were kids together in an orphanage, Timo (Steven Yeun), is a bit tougher to get a handle on, a guy who is trying to get by, maybe at the expense of others, a bit of a puzzle as he asks Mickey what it’s like to die but not sure of his own survival skills. Yeun nails this but I wish he had more screen time.
Ruffalo follows his whacked-out Oscar-nominated Poor Things work with yet another nutcase, a subpar Donald Trump surrogate who wants to lead this new colonization but was a complete failure on Earth. He is a total narcissist but a man who is completely unqualified in every way, except to have no empathy, a class divider who constantly needs reassurance from his wife, perfectly played by Collette. Both actors invest in this made-for-each-other couple, somehow loving and pathetic at the same time. With all that is going on in D.C. these days, you almost could look at Ruffalo’s Marshall as a perfect candidate to run an agency, so completely unqualified but trying to succeed away from the world in which he failed. Ruffalo is over the top in a good way.
Then there are the Creepers, weird insect-looking things with teeth for miles and, as we will understand, are misunderstood. At first they are alien-like frightening, a prop for one of Mickey’s deaths early on, except it doesn’t go as one might expect. They are divided into Mama, Juniors and Baby Creepers, and like the last third of Bong’s wonderfully crazy but humane Okja (the film in the director’s canon that most reminded me of Mickey 17 due to its naked humanity in the shadow of all this death), the Creepers will have you rooting them on, just as those pigs marched into a slaughterhouse did so heartbreakingly in Okja. Credit VFX supervisor Dan Glass and his team for winning work here.
The cinematography from Darius Khondji and inventive production design from Fiona Crombie of this futuristic place that varies between drab lab-like atmosphere and garish digs of Marshall, is first rate, as is the tricky editing pace of Yang Jinmo, who keeps this 2-hour, 19-minute running time brisk and moving.
Based on the book by Edward Ashton, Bong has adapted with a distinctive cinematic style as a dizzyingly funny but pertinent satire, political in the sense of being led into hopelessness by the stupidity of unfeeling leaders, but also in the end, a cautionary tale about finding real worth in yourself and stepping up to claim it. Mickey 17 is about dehumanization, class divide, superiority by those most inferior and a feeling we are all falling down the rabbit hole — until we find a way to climb out. For those who can identify with standing in line just to stop the world and get off, this is the movie for you, a death-defying and dizzying wild ride. Of course, director Bong invests it all with wry sometimes even silly humor, but Paddy Chayefsky for one would have loved it.
Producers are Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Bong and Dooho Choi.
Title: Mickey 17
Distributor: Warner Bros
Festival: Berlin (Out of Competition)
Release date: March 7, 2025
Screenwriter-director: Bong Joon Ho
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun
Rating: R
Running time: 2 hr 19 mins
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