Reboot

Film: Mickey 17
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!

The best science fiction asks interesting questions that can’t really be answered by non-genre fiction. One of those questions that gets asked is how we define ourselves as human beings. Star Trek explored this with characters like Spock, Worf, and Data, for instance. Mickey 17 asks this question in the title character. Our title character Mickey (Robert Pattinson) is essentially a clone, someone who in the context of the film has been basically 3D printed. Is he human? Depending on who you ask in the movie, you’re going to get a different answer.

Going into Mickey 17, I figured there was going to be a lot of similarity to Moon, and there is some surface similarity. But where Moon is about deep, existential questions, Mickey 17 is much more visceral and also much more political. In today’s climate, it’s hard not to see this through a political lens, whether that was intended or not. However, since this was written in part and directed by Bong Joon Ho, looking at this politically is going to more often than not be the right way to do things.

In the future, a colony ship headed by a failed politician named Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) ship out to a new planet called Niflheim. Mickey Barnes and his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) are being pursued by an extremely aggressive loan shark and decide to jump on board the expedition, which is mainly going to be filled with Marshall’s adoring political followers. Timo gets himself signed on as a shuttle pilot, but Mickey has no such skills, and so becomes an “expendable,” someone who will be essentially sent on extremely dangerous and suicide missions, and will then be reprinted and have his memories restored when he dies. As the name of the film implies, Mickey has had his share of deaths and reprintings up to this point.

Once on Niflheim, a series of Mickey’s is used to develop a vaccine for the local pathogens. Mickey 17 is then sent out to collect a specimen of the local fauna, nicknamed “creepers” by the humans. Mickey falls, though, and while his expensive gear is recovered, he is left to die—after all, he’ll just get reprinted. Instead, the creatures rescue him and return him to the surface of the planet, but when he gets back to the human base, he discovers that Mickey 18 has already been printed. This is dangerous—the expendables are already controversial, and one of the agreements is that if at any time there are two copies of someone alive, all copies will be permanently destroyed, and the person no longer printed.

The two Mickeys are initially exciting for his love interest Nasha (Naomi Ackie), but eventually, you can rest assure that everything will go pear-shaped.

I genuinely love what Robert Pattinson is doing with his career. He made the sparkly vampire movies and got enough money doing that so that he never really has to work again for the rest of his life if he doesn’t want to. So now, while he’ll take the occasional big budget film (he is the new Batman, after all), a lot of what he is doing is interesting passion projects. Sure, Mickey 17 isn’t an indie film, but it’s an unusual one, it’s a genre film, and it’s one where the message and the story are going to be much more important than the possibility of toy sales based on the property. Pattinson is taking roles that are meaningful to him or that allow him to do something interesting, and Mickey 17 falls right in line with that.

The initial part of the film is told in sort of flashback. We see Mickey abandoned at the start of the film and then spend about half an hour getting back to that spot—seeing his trouble with the loan shark, becoming an expendable, and dying several times before we wind up at the bottom of a ravine again. This is darkly comic, of course, but also an observation—Mickey is frequently put into situations where he is clearly being sacrificed—he’s sent out to make repairs on the ship and the specifically exposed to radiation so that how his symptoms change and how long he takes to die can be studied. There is very much a sense in this of Mickey dying (literally) at the whims of his masters, often callously and cruelly. After all, the next day, they’re going to print up another Mickey.

It's hard not to look at the politics of the film as well. There are clear parallels between the malignant narcissist in the film and those we see on the world stage and that’s clearly not a coincidence.

One of the best features of Mickey 17 is how lived-in it looks. It’s similar to Alien in that respect. We’re not given gleaming space ships and futuristic chrome, but dirt and dinginess. The world feels real because the world is not fancy or futuristic for all of it taking place in large part on a different planet. This is a film that is smudgy, and this makes sense—Mickey himself is essentially a coal miner, repeatedly sacrificing himself over and over for the good of his masters, up to and including his many, multiple deaths.

There are people who will be surprised at the political turn this takes, and a lot of them will be disappointed at this turn of events. That’s too bad, because it’s the deeper meanings that make this worth seeing.

Why to watch Mickey 17: Because it’s Bong Joon Ho and because Robert Pattinson takes really interesting roles.
Why not to watch: The creepers look kind of like pillbugs, and if that freaks you out, you’re going to have some issues in the latter half.