Review of Mickey 17 (2025)
Seen in 2025.
After a productive detour into drama with Parasite (2019), Bong returns to science fiction like The Host (2006), Snowpiercer (2013), and Okja (2017). This time he has the advantage of adapting a novel, so the worldbuilding is his best yet, but Bong does show a characteristic disinterest in the quality of his premises. As usual, he lavishes his attention on morality and sensuality. The leisurely, self-conscious acting is more unusual. Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette swerve widely as a Trumpian corpo-cult-state power couple that reminds me of Don’t Look Up (2021). It looks like the actors had fun, which is fun, admittedly at the expense of the tempo and the plot. The climax in particular is a little too slow, awkwardly fusing all of the plot lines with an extraterrestrial single-species ecosystem that is itself a fusion of the Gnoph-keh from “The Horror in the Museum” (1932) with the swarming Ohmu of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1982) as copy-pasted 3D assets.
There are a lot of nice details, like the sex positivity, and the weak implication that Mickey 17 resembles the original Mickey—at the time of his death—more closely than the other copies because those two in particular were persecuted. Mickey 18, in my interpretation, is more like the Timo that the original Mickey teamed up with in a stupid business venture, because a glitch in the dystopian people-printer technology has robbed him of the consequences of the original’s actions. Other details aren’t so nice. Kai never quite gels as a character, there is not enough of Dorothy, and there aren’t enough sets, supporting characters or flora to build the setting properly. There is an explanation for the lack of robots, but in relation to the amount of infodumping on Expendables, it’s too bad that Mickey is the only Expendable. A glowing iron rod looks fake, as if Bong had never been around anything that hot, but the film is beautiful enough to deserve seeing in a theatre.