Major spoilers ahead for Mickey 17. You’ve been warned.
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Bong Joon-ho is without a doubt one of the best writers/directors working today. His unique creative vision has brought us terrific and thoughtful stories like Okja (2017), his Oscar-winning Parasite (2019) and my personal favorite, Snowpiercer (2013). So of course, any new material from him would be hotly anticipated. But does his new (although delayed a year in its release) work, Mickey 17, live up to the high standards he’s set? Read on to find out.
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Mickey 17 begins in the near future on a planet called Niflheim (in Norse mythology, the cold, dark land of the dead). A worker named Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) stares up from the bottom of an icy crevasse. His partner and friend Nimo (Steven Yeun) finds him and marvels that Mickey’s still alive. Then Nimo says nonchalantly that he can’t rescue him because he doesn’t have enough rope to reach him. He asks Mickey what it’s like to die. But before Mickey can say anything, a large creature that’s a cross between an armadillo and a tardigrade comes toward him, looking like it’s about to eat him.
Mickey narrates his own story and says how he hates dying. But dying is his job – he’s known as an “expendable.” Cut to four years earlier, back on Earth. Timo had a real knack for getting the both of them into trouble with his moneymaking ventures. He opened a macaron shop by borrowing money from a loan shark named Darius (Ian Hanmore). Darius enjoys making videos of people dying in horrible ways, so if they don’t come up with the money, he’ll be only too happy to kill them.
In order to avoid Darius, Timo and Mickey sign up to work helping colonize Niflheim. While Timo somehow manages to get a job as a pilot, Mickey signs up to be an expendable. But he never bothers to actually read the job description. Next thing he knows, he’s taking on dangerous jobs like going down to the planet’s surface and taking off his helmet. Or getting infected with deadly viruses and testing out vaccines.
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Every time he dies, Mickey’s body gets reprinted. And in fairly short order, they’ve reprinted him 17 times. The only good thing is that the scientists also transfer his memories from one version to the next. But not all the memories are good ones. He’s haunted by his mother’s death when he was young, which he believes he caused.
The one good thing in his life – or rather, lives – is Nasha (Naomi Ackie). She’s a security agent who Mickey met during lunch one day. Being extremely scarce, food is highly regulated. The colonists barely get enough to live on and get in trouble for taking more than necessary. Nasha gives Mickey some of her food, and they fall quickly in love – and lust – having lots and lots of sex despite it not being permitted by the leadership.
Speaking of the leadership, that would be President Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette). Back on Earth, Marshall was a celebrity and a failed politician. On Niflheim, he and Ylfa live like kings while everyone else lives in squalor. The Marshalls promote a televangelist-reality-show-type mindset, where everyone must be grateful to be there and love the Marshalls like gods.
On another expedition, Mickey 17 joins Timo and agents Jennifer (Ellen Robertson) and Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei) on Niflheim’s surface. Marshall wants them to capture one of those indigenous creatures, which they call “creepers.” They come across a bunch of smaller ones, and when Jennifer shoots at one of them, a cascade of icy rock falls on her and kills her.
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This brings us back to the beginning of the flick when Mickey fell into the crevasse. But instead of eating him, the giant creeper drags Mickey up and out of the hole. The smaller ones help push him up to the surface. Mickey’s amazed they didn’t kill him and even manages to sort of communicate with them by mimicking their sounds.
Mickey returns to the ship and to his room. When he lies down to sleep, he’s shocked to find that he’s already been reprinted. Mickey 17 and 18 realize they’re in big trouble. Not long ago, a serial murderer named Alan Manikova (Edward Davis) used the body printer to make multiples of himself. He used the clones to commit the murders, so he always had an alibi. So ever since, “multiples” have been considered a crime, and the punishment is permanent deletion of the person’s existence.
Mickey 18 tries to kill 17, but then one of Marshall’s cronies shows up. 18 hides while 17 gets invited to dinner with Marshall and Ylfa. Mickey 17 snarfs down the raw steak that the Marshalls give him while they prattle on about the creepers. Kai joins them, and the Marshalls tell her how sorry they are about Jennifer. Then suddenly, Mickey gets violently ill. Turns out the head scientist, Arkady (Cameron Britton), injected the steak with a new growth hormone so they could test it out. Arkady tries using experimental painkillers on Mickey, but they don’t work.
Kai takes Mickey 17 back to her room and makes him tea to help him recover. She sits next to him (clearly wanting to sleep with him) and asks him what it’s like to die. Even though he hates answering the question that everyone always asks, he tells her. He says he hates it because it’s scary every time. But the one thing that keeps him going – is Nasha. She stayed with him throughout every reprinting, even endangering herself to stay with him while he died of one of the viruses. He leaves Kai, not wanting to cheat.
Mickey 17 goes back to his room to find 18 and Nasha both high on drugs. Nasha’s all excited to have two Mickeys, wanting to have a threesome. But then Kai shows up with some tea and sees the doubles. She proposes to Nasha that they share them as a sort of blackmail, but Nasha won’t agree to it.
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Meanwhile, Mickey 18, who’s markedly more aggressive than 17, has a self-imposed mission – to kill Marshall. He goes to a gathering where the Marshalls have brought a giant rock from the surface inside. They slice it in half, and Marshall deems that the rock will be a monument with all the colonists’ names engraved on it.
But then a baby creeper pops out from a hole in the rock. While it causes chaos running around, Mickey 18 takes a shot at Marshall. He misses but does graze his cheek. The baby creeper dies a horrible death as every agent with a gun shoots it. But then another one pops out of the rock, and the scientists capture it.
The leadership imprisons both Mickeys and Nasha. Sitting in cages next to each other, Mickey 17 tells Nasha how the creepers saved him. Nasha realizes that the creepers must be peaceful even though the Marshalls want to kill them all. Then Timo shows up, telling them that loan shark Darius managed to find him. If he doesn’t send Darius a video of him killing Mickey, he’s dead.
Mickey 18 volunteers to die in 17’s place, and then they manage to knock Timo out and escape. But agents capture them and bring them to the Marshalls. They’re getting ready to attack the creepers with Arkady’s new nerve gas. Nasha tries to convince them that it’s wrong to attack, but they don’t listen. The creepers gather en masse around the ship, wanting the babies back.
Ylfa heartlessly cuts the tail of the surviving baby, putting the pieces in a blender and making a sauce out of it. That’s her thing – making sauces, calling it the “true litmus test of any civilization.” She and Marshall strap explosives to both Mickeys and tell them to get out there and gather 100 creeper tails. The one who doesn’t succeed dies.
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The Mickeys go outside among the creeper horde, and 17 goes to the Mother Creeper (voiced by Anna Mouglalis) to try and resolve things. One of the scientists (Patsy Herran), who’s always been nice to Mickey, gives 17 a rudimentary translating device. The Mother Creeper tells Mickey 17 that they want the baby back. And in restitution for killing the other baby, the Mother says they want a human to die. If they don’t comply, they’ll kill everyone.
Mickey 17 gestures to Nasha a sign that tells her to bring the baby out. But Nasha’s stuck holding onto a rope with her teeth that’s keeping the baby from dropping into the furnace used to dispose of the dead Mickeys. Not liking that Mickey 17’s trying to negotiate with the creepers, Marshall decides to go outside himself and kill the Mother – all while being filmed, of course.
With the help of one of the other agents, Zeke (Stephen Park), Nasha’s able to get free and grab Ylfa in a Black Widow-type hold. She threatens to break Ylfa’s neck if they let the baby creeper die. With Zeke’s help, they get the baby creeper back, and she rushes outside to give it back.
Meanwhile, the creepers swarm around the Mother to protect her as Marshall gets a bazooka to kill her. Mickey 18 intercepts Marshall and fights him – then, in an unusually selfless move, he sets off the explosive he’s wearing, taking them both out. Ylfa’s horrified at witnessing his death and gets taken away, hysterical. The Mother takes the baby back from Nasha and returns home with the rest of the creepers.
Cut to six months later, and the colony has flourished. Mainly due to the new leadership – Nasha. Mickey 17 details in narration everything else that’s happened. Marshall’s death drove Ylfa nuts, and she killed herself. And Timo, in his usual string of unusually good luck, found Darius’ crony and killed him, avoiding death himself.
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Mickey continues to work with the creepers to better understand them. Turns out they wouldn’t have been able to follow through on their threat to kill everyone. But they know how to bluff as well as humans do. And he and Nasha are still together. But Mickey has terrible visions sometimes, like seeing Ylfa printing out a new version of Marshall.
But it’s just a vision, and everyone gathers at a ceremony led by Nasha to officially end the expendables program. Mickey snaps out of his vision just in time to be the one to push the button to blow up the body printer. And Mickey – who’s now able to go by his full name, Mickey Barnes – says he’s realized that it’s okay to be happy.
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As I said in the beginning, Snowpiercer is my favorite of Bong Joon-ho’s work. Its darkly dystopian comedy and singular creativity were like nothing I’d ever seen before. And it really feels like Mickey 17 exists in that same universe. In fact, you could say Mickey 17 is just Snowpiercer on another planet. So perhaps Mickey 17 isn’t the director’s most unique work. But there’s no question it goes all out in its spectacle.
There’s a lot to love about the flick. It looks gorgeous, and the visual effects are top-notch. But the main selling point is Robert Pattinson’s all-in performance. He handles the heavy load of being the story’s heart and soul as the kind-if-kinda dumb Mickey 17.
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Then when 18 enters the picture, he handles the clone’s callous aggressiveness with equal skill. Not to mention the fact that visual effects have improved enough over the decades to make having two Pattinsons in the same shot look absolutely seamless.
The darkest of dark comedy is the flick’s other high point. The montage of Mickey’s various deaths is all at once tragic and cruel – but also hilarious. Like when his new clones come out of the printer without anything to catch him, and the new Mickey just slides out and falls to the floor in a slimy blob. And then immediately gets a shot in the butt of something experimental and no doubt lethal.
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And of course, there are the Marshalls. There’s not much subtlety about who Mark Ruffalo’s character is modeled after, and while he’s over-the-top ridiculous, he’s also scary in his racial superiority ideas. Toni Collette, who’s incapable of turning in a bad performance, charms in an equally screwed-up way, especially as she’s blithely chopping the tail of one of the creepers just to make a sauce. The Marshalls are a picture of some of the worst human attributes, and while you’re laughing at their absurdity, you’re also lamenting the state of the species.
But there are also a couple of truly touching scenes that remind you what’s good about humanity. When Nasha sits in a tank full of deadly virus (in a spacesuit, of course) just to hold Mickey and comfort him as he’s dying, it really hits hard. And when Mickey confides to Kai about what death is like for him, it shows that Mickey’s way more than just a shmuck.
The only real problem with Mickey 17 is that there’s just too much going on. There are way too many subplots that add to the comedy but don’t really move the story forward. So while you get a ton of movie for your money, the flick really doesn’t need to be so long. I think Bong Joon-ho had a lot of ideas he wanted to realize, but in trying to cram them all in, he ended up with a kind of ungainly mess.
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Overall though, Mickey 17 is an ambitious, all-too-timely and dark tale that leaves you with a lot to think about after you walk out of the theater. And it’s much better to be a flick that’s perhaps a bit too long and overstuffed than an 88-minute piece of fluff that you don’t even remember seeing a week later.
Directed by: Bong Joon-ho
Written by: Bong Joon-ho, Edward Ashton (novel)
Release date: Mar 7, 2025
Rating: R
Run time: 2hr, 17min
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
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