Mickey 17 Review: Just Silly Sci Fi?

Bong Joon Ho and Robert Pattinson are a match made in heaven in Mickey 17

With the follow up to 2020 Best Picture winner Parasite, history making South Korean director Bong Joon Ho finds himself releasing his latest work into an entirely new environment. Elevated from a cult favourite film maker to a nigh on household name, expectations are running high for wacky Sci Fi adaption Mickey 17. Happily, the film is a riotously good time that refuses to dilute the director’s unique sense of humour in the face of major studio interest.

Desperate to escape his impoverished life on earth, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) signs himself up for a dangerous space mission headed by politician turned cult leader Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his quietly dangerous wife Ylfa (Toni Collette.) The mission takes thousands of fanatical volunteers to a desolate ice planet with the intention of starting a new human colony, but with rations running low and tensions high, the mission doesn’t go as smoothly as promised.

Due to a lack of any real talent or skill Mickey is forced to work as an ‘expendable.’ With his memories and consciousness uploaded to a database he takes on impossibly dangerous tasks. If and when he is killed in the line of duty; scientists print a new body for Mickey, transfer over his memories, and he starts back at work again the next day as if suffering a gruesomely agonising death never even happened. The technology and ethics used to create seventeen iterations of Pattinson’s Mickey are predictably ‘iffy’ to say the least, leading to fertile ground for a scathing social satire.

While Bong’s Korean work has always felt at least a little grounded in reality compared to his more fantastical, bombastic English language films, they’ve all shared a common interest in the horrors of a society driven by unchecked capitalism. Mickey 17 retreads themes seen in some of his earlier work, from the dystopian violence of Snowpiercer and disregard for the natural world in Okja, to the rampant classism of Parasite. Yet while Mickey 17 graphically explores the horrors of its titular characters Sisyphean nightmare, it also feels like the work of a writer/director who appreciates the grim whimsy of the world he has created.

It’s thematically similar but tonally a little different to Bong’s previous work, the bleak setting and occasional gore more often leading to laugh out loud comedy rather than existential dread. A bonkers piece of absurdity that frames a set of memorable, larger than life characters – it’s reminiscent of the knowingly silly Sci Fi’s of the 80s and 90s. Think The Fifth Element or Total Recall.

We love to see Robert Pattinson playing a weird little guy and he gives the best performance of his already stacked career here. The different iterations of Mickey are wholly unique and uniquely likeable. Affable wet blanket 17 and Jack Nicholson-esque psychopath 18 get the most screen time, and watching scenes where Pattinson flits between the two are an absolute masterclass in fearless but fun acting. While he’s always felt like a character actor cursed to be a leading man, there can be no doubt here that he has the charisma and talent to be right at the top of the A-list – willingly or not.

All of the supporting characters are irresistibly weird and they’re clearly having a hell of a good time playing in a project that encourages oddity – Naomi Ackie’s fierce space cop, Steven Yuen’s impossibly lucky grifter and, er, surprise Tim Key in a pigeon costume? If Mark Ruffalo is basing his performance of a duck lipped, TV obsessed, space station autocrat wanting to ‘’start a race of super people on a pure white planet’’ on a certain orange shit gibbon then who are we to question it?

My only minor criticism of the relentlessly enjoyable Mickey 17 is that it in the end, it goes exactly where you think it will. While Bong has turned out some impeccably unexpected, gasp worthy twists during his filmmaking career so far, there are no such moments here. One can’t help but feel there could have been a smarter story made out of such an interesting premise as ‘the man who can’t stay dead.’

Likely to delight existing Bong Joon Ho fans and entertain newcomers alike, Mickey 17 is a demented, disgusting but ultimately silly Sci Fi romp that plays with the darker ethical and sociological questions at its heart without ever taking them too seriously. Pattinson’s Mickey Barnes is a brilliant character – I’d watch 16 more versions of him any day.

Mickey 17 is out in cinemas worldwide now