Mickey 17: Bong Joon Ho’s wild sci-fi satire takes aim at white nationalism
Starring Robert Pattinson as an expendable member of a colonising space mission who is repeatedly ‘reprinted’ at death, Bong Joon Ho’s playful adaptation of Edward Ashton's novel is delightfully odd and overtly political.
It’s been six years since the South Korean director Bong Joon Ho broke into the big league with the Oscar-winning Parasite (2019). A delayed release date for Mickey 17 worried some; perhaps the studio didn’t know how to position the film, given the director’s return to the crazy exuberance of his early creature-feature The Host (2006) or the super-pig shenanigans of Okja (2017). Or was it worried by the overt liberal politics of this frenetic satire?
The plot is boiler-plate science fiction: Mickey Barnes has signed up to be the ‘expendable’ crew member on an off-world colonising mission. He is number 17 because at death he can be reprinted in a giant 3D bio-printer and so is used to test bio-weapons or vaccines, which keep killing him off during the four-year journey to the target planet. We see this anti-hero spat out into a printer tray many times (ten more times than the source novel by Edward Ashton, Mickey7, the director has gleefully pointed out). This much fun killing off the star vehicle has not been had since Tom Cruise’s repeated deaths in Edge of Tomorrow (2014). For the second half of the film, Pattinson plays subtly different multiples of Mickey with affecting skill amid the riotous grand scale of the CGI special effects.
The colonising mission is headed by a failed American politician, Kenneth Marshall, played by Mark Ruffalo in an overt mimicking of Trump’s wounded narcissism and Elon Musk’s cranky Mars-colonising obsession, with an added dose of generic TV evangelical preacher. Ruffalo’s turn as the Victorian cad in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023) was awkwardly arch, but here, teamed with suitably ghastly wife Ylfa, played with relish by Toni Collette, he judges the black comedy well.
Marshall’s followers who sign up to join the mission are depicted in red baseball caps familiar from Trump campaign rallies. One slavish devotee we follow is played by the English comedian Tim Key, perhaps best known as Sidekick Simon to Alan Partridge. It’s a quirky turn, performed for most of the film in a fancy-dress pigeon outfit: an indication of Bong’s pleasing devotion to oddity.
People keep asking Mickey what it is like to die over and over, and his lowly status, skulking in the ship’s grungy basement, echoes the class politics explored in Parasite. Mickey seems like a hapless fall guy in a Philip K. Dick novel. But his precarious existential condition flips into abundance when he is reprinted too soon and gains a double. Philosophical issues around technology and ethics are gestured at here, but the film chooses a different route to explore.
When the colonists arrive, the planet Niflheim (named for the cold, misty world of the dead in Norse mythology) unfortunately proves to be inhabited by ‘creepers’. These are part trilobite, part giant woodlice, with medusoid tentacled mouths, looking a bit like the heptapods from Arrival (2016). They are menacing but also, it turns out, rather cute, like plushies of H.P. Lovecraft’s monster-god Cthulhu.
The final act turns on the classic science fiction scenario of contrasting reactions to encountering the alien Other: whether to fight and exterminate or to find a way to coexist. The film is at its most trenchant in exploring the colonising mentality of Marshall and his team, who are explicitly depicted as Christian white nationalists and crypto-fascists with a creepy billionaire fantasy of creating a racially ‘pure’ colony by any means necessary. The white fragility of this fantasy is the target of Bong’s satire: it is no surprise that this particular ‘Marshall’ plan involves all-out war. Even as the film cranks up the special effects, aiming for the science-fictional sublime, these scenes still manage to hang on to the human drama planted in the first half of the film, in the romance between Mickey and Nasha (a charismatic performance from Naomi Ackie).
It would be speculation to suggest the release date was pushed back so that it came after the American election in November 2024, but as it happens the film has landed in the first weeks of a second Trump presidency notable for the heavy involvement of the tech-fantasist Musk and an unexpected imperialist tone from a president who dreams of colonising Greenland or Canada. This could hardly have been foreseen when the principal photography was completed in 2022, but amid the film’s madcappery, its arrival in this moment gives it an extra push of political urgency.
► Mickey 17 is in UK cinemas from 7 March.