Well Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer didn’t quite work, and nor does his Mickey 17, and for pretty much the same reasons. Small stuff – great; world building – great; political satire – gruesome.
It’s Robert Pattinson in the lead, vaguely back in the sort of fantasy territory that made his name (I mean Harry Potter and Twilight), as an “expendable” in a dystopian future where humanity is fleeing Earth, heading out towards the brave new world of Niflheim on board a spaceship.
He’s the living equivalent of a crash-test dummy, the one sent in to check things out whenever a new situation arises. Is it poisonous, will it eat us, will it cause our flesh to bubble? Send for Mickey.
In Snowpiercer our heroes started at the back of a train piling through snowy post-apocalyptic wastes and worked their way to the front. It was a massive and increasingly tiresome metaphor, fabulous though the film looked.
Here Mickey starts from possibly even further back. He’s barely human at all, though all his memories and feelings are transferred from his old self to his new one every time a Mickey dies and another one needs to be “printed” – whoever’s idea it was to show Mickey being disgorged jerkily from the organic 3D printer like a sheet of paper arriving by fax machine deserves a big bonus.
There are the makings of three decent Dr Who stories here. In one the occupants of the spaceship arrive on a new world and set about preparing to eliminate all sentient life already there, at the behest of blowhard politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his awful wife (Toni Collette). In another Mickey is accidentally cloned, leading to Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 vying for existence in a this-town-ain’t-big-enough world. In the third Mickey falls in love with Nasha (Naomi Ackie) while another hot young woman on the ship (Anamaria Vartolomei) also sets her sights on him. Another shadowy half story also keeps intruding, featuring Mickey’s pal from Earth, Timo (Steven Yeun), who sold him down the river once years before and will probably do it again.
A lot of it happens in voiceover, with Mickey commenting on the events that befall him. On top of that there’s irony, adding more emotional distance between us and what’s going on. Humour, too, which Bong is best at (as in Memories of Murder) when he uses a teaspoon rather than a trowel, as here.
Ruffalo’s Marshall, I mean, a woeful, increasingly backfiring and tin-eared character who is a mix of Donald Trump, a gameshow host/evangelist preacher and Dr Evil.
The real problem with Mickey 17 is this lunge at politics, at attempting to say something important about the world, through satire so blunt that it is simply no longer satire.
Without that, and without the attempts at humour (barely any of which work) it would be straight sci-fi, and it’s understandable that Bong doesn’t want to do that. Perhaps more saliently, it would also look quite a bit like Dune.
But the world-building is superb. So much money has been lavished on, for example, the giant woodlice-alike creatures that inhabit Niflheim. En masse they look like buffalo, which is doubtless deliberate – the colonisers wiping out the indigents. And the side performances are refreshing palate cleansers – comedian Tim Key as a man dressed as a chicken, Thomas Turgoose as a gun-drunk soldier, Patsy Ferran as a young scientist whose eyerolls say it all.
The DP is Darius Khondji – who’s been behind several notable films (Delicatessen, Seven, Amour and Uncut Gems), and though “notable” isn’t the first adjective you’d reach for to describe Mickey 17, its boxfresh sci-fi looks do bring to mind something like Gravity. It looks great.
Perhaps a real organic 3D printer exists, life imitates art and there are two adjacent Bong Joon Hos – the one who made Memories of Murder, The Host and Parasite and the one who made Snowpiercer, Okja and now Mickey 17. Both are excellent, super-accomplished film-makers. One favours irony and is a master of it, the other goes for satire, and never quite knows when enough is enough.
Mickey 17 – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
