This week, I went out with my friends to see Mickey 17, a 2025 sci-fi comedy written and directed by Bong Joon Ho, based on the novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton. It takes place in 2054, where Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is a nobody who, along with his friend Timo (Steven Yeun), are poor and struggling and owe money to a murderous loan shark, and in order to escape Earth and their debts, they sign up to work on a spaceship expedition that is led by failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) to colonize another planet. Timo gets work as a shuttle pilot, and Mickey, not having any prospects in life and not thinking things through, signs up to be an "Expendable," essentially donating his body for scientists to use for testing in experiments, and his DNA, brain, and memories are captured, so that when he inevitably dies in these experiments (like testing the air on a new planet and dying from viruses until a vaccine can be developed), and his body is tossed down into a furnace, he is regenerated within a day through a 3-D printer, printing out his whole body, including stops and starts like an actual printer spitting out paper.
When the film catches up to the most current version of Mickey, he is in his 17th life, with all his memories intact, including remembering all his previous deaths. People on the ship, working grunt jobs and on limited rations, keep asking him "What's it like to die?" and he can't say anything more than "It sucks." Through all of his lives as Mickey 1-17, he has had a relationship with security agent Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a sexy, fun, and playful romance where they share private jokes like drawing stick figure sex positions to each other.
Four years into the expedition, after a vaccine has been developed, Mickey 17 is to capture one of the indigenous creatures on the planet, called "creepers" by the spaceship crew (but whom my friends compared to the creatures in Hayao Miyazaki's 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind). He falls through the ice, is left for dead, but rather than being eaten by the creepers, he is rescued by them and returned to the surface. But this causes more problems, as Mickey 18 (also played by Pattison) was developed in his presumed death and absence, and as there are laws against multiple clones existing at the same time due to past crimes, neither can be alive at the same time.
The film is a lot of fun to watch, very offbeat and weird, and a lot of credit goes to Robert Pattinson's dual performance as Mickey 17 and Mickey 18. It's hard when an actor plays twins or clones and is acting opposite themselves, to make themselves distinct so that the "twins" don't get confused by the audience, and with both Mickeys having very different personalities and slightly different voices, it's easy to tell them apart as two separate characters. Pattison affects this kind of pathetic, squirrelly voice, similar to when he put on an exaggerated character voice as the Heron in the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki's film The Boy and the Heron (2023), and he's a fantastic actor, committed to physical comedy (like quick scenes where Mickey is being printed out but there is no tray to catch him so he just droops out of the printer and flips onto the floor) and facial expressions like mocking gestures that Mickey 18 makes at others.
Mark Ruffalo's performance as Kenneth feels inspired as a mix between the tele-evangelist theatrics of Jimmy Swaggart and the pompous arrogance of Donald Trump, and as Kenneth is described as having had two failed presidential elections before deciding to leave Earth to start his own colony elsewhere, it's clear that Bong may have written this with the idea of Trump losing the 2024 election, but he couldn't have predicted the results. Ruffalo is a charming and likable actor, so even if he's playing a despicable villain, it's hard to completely hate him because of Ruffalo himself. Toni Collette's role as Kenneth's wife Ylfa is more conniving and like the Lady Macbeth to her husband, sneaking him ideas while being into developing sauces and fancy foods, as the crew of workers will get their rations cut in half and be starving.
Naomi Ackie (I Wanna Dance With Somebody; Blink Twice; Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker) is a delight to watch in this film, really bright and funny, with a gap-toothed smile, and game for action sequences and commanding the film as the heroine, especially in the finale. She and Pattinson have sweet chemistry, and were enjoyable to watch together.
The film is 2 hours and 17 minutes long, and the finale goes on for much longer than it needed to be, when it starts turning into a war film, and more and more gets layered on top of each other, where I couldn't tell when the end point was going to be. I would think it would be over, then more sequences and plot points would be added. I felt the finale got too bloated with too many ideas at once, but up until then, I really liked the movie a lot, and enjoyed seeing a creative and weird sci-fi comedy with my friends and discussing it afterwards.