It’s been six years since South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite surprisingly but deservedly swept the Oscars and became the first non-English language film to win Best Picture. The black comedy thriller actually followed Bong’s first two English language films – 2013′s post-apocalyptic class-war thriller Snowpiercer, and 2017′s Okja, a meat-is murder sci-fi comedy about a genetically modified super-pig and the girl who raised it.
They were both South Korean-US productions with recognisable Hollywood faces. So, too, is Mickey 17, an inventive but wearying and fitfully funny sci-fi satire starring Robert Pattinson opposite, well, Robert Pattinson.
He plays the repeatedly cloned Mickey, a man who dies over and over again, only to be “reprinted”, memory intact, for another suicide mission. It’s his own fault for not reading the small print when he signed up as an “expendable” crew member and resident lab rat on a spaceship destined for a new planet.
Adapted from the 2022 novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, it’s very much a film by the man who turned Snowpiercer and Okja into such genre-bending weird trips, rather than the one who made Parasite into such a riveting contemporary thriller with a political conscience. Parasite’s performance possibly raised budgets and expectations on this, too. But while Mickey 17 manages some big-scale spectacles once it’s landed on the snowy planet Nilfheim, it’s really not much to look at.
And while it extrapolates plenty of 2025 issues – the tech-bro space race, populist politicians with gullible followers, climate change, invasion and genocide – to another galaxy in 2054, it’s all done with a curiously soft touch. It’s also done with some major swings in tone and variable performances.
Playing the spaceship’s political power couple Kenneth and Ylfa Marshall, Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette become the film’s greatest irritants.
Their cartoon villain act apparently requires Ruffalo to deliver all his lines with Donald Trump-adjacent diction through gleaming white teeth.
Fortunately, Pattinson is much better as the Mickeys, whose 17th incarnation also acts as the narrator for much of the film, in a voice that is apparently based on Steve Buscemi.
Despite being dispatched and re-hatched multiple times, he has managed to maintain an intimate relationship with Naomi Ackie’s security officer Nasha, who comforts him through every near and actual death experience.
Problems arise when he’s left for dead during an excursion to Nilfheim’s frozen wastes, only to be rescued by the caterpillar-like creatures that have been dubbed “creepers” and can grow to the size of the genetically modified super-pig.
Finding his way back to the ship, Mickey 17 finds that a Mickey 18 has already popped out of the printer and taken up residence with his girlfriend. The possible polyamory isn’t the problem – Nasha’s quite keen – but there are rules against “multiples” existing at the same time, the logic of which is explained in a grim backstory about the tech’s inventor.
Also, Mickey 18 seems to have anger issues his predecessor hasn’t and he’s compelled to assassinate Kenneth Marshall, just as the leader is launching plans to exterminate the creeper population.
There are other elements to the sprawling story, including the reasons Mickey left Earth in a hurry in the first place, the backing of the Marshalls by a seemingly all-powerful religious organisation, a growing drug problem among the crew, and a minor character who inexplicably spends much of the film dressed as a pigeon.
It’s all part of a very messy tale that might remind some of when Terry Gilliam was doing dystopian things or the sillier sci-fi bits of the Luc Besson canon.
As a comedy it’s delivered with a large amount of clunk, and as a satire it’s a bit like those creepers – no real bite, just a lot of wobbly bits pointing in lots of directions.
And being about a man caught in a perpetual loop of life and death, here’s a movie that might have something to say about humankind as disposable and reconstituted biomatter.
Mickey himself keeps getting asked what it’s like to die. He never verbalises a response and this film, idiosyncratic and imaginative as it is, can’t find an answer for him either.
Rating out of five: ★★½
Mickey 17, directed by Bong Joon-ho, is in cinemas now.
