In the not so distant future when Earth is plagued by wind and dust storms, rich and powerful leaders have turned to space travel as an option to continue the proliferation of the human species.  Space travel, however, comes with great risks so through development of “human printing technology” a new workforce called “expendables” arise as a way for even the poor to escape the dying planet.  Mickey (Robert Pattinson) is one such expendable who is aboard Kenneth Marshall’s (Mark Ruffalo) expedition to colonize Niflheim.  

As a follow-up to his historic Parasite (2019), Bong Joon-ho adapts Edward Ashton’s sci-fi novel Mickey 7 into a campy 137-minute romp, titled for the screen as Mickey 17, and premiering at the 2025 edition of the Berlin International Film Festival.  Released theatrically by Warner Brothers, the title has bounced all around the calendar from its original 2024 date, to an Easter opening, before finally settling on early March.  Released with limited marketing other than the myriad of headlines chronicling the release schedule changes, and without a platform on over 3,000 screens, on one hand it is refreshing to see Warner Brothers actually open an auteur’s picture wide, but under Zaslav’s questionable leadership of the studio, one can not help but to speculate that it seems as if Mickey 17 has been destined to underperform so that it could be used as evidence to play games with the rest of the studio’s upcoming slate should shareholders start getting cold feet. 

Business aside, Mickey 17 fits well into Joon-ho’s body of work despite feeling like a sharp turn from his acclaimed Parasite.  Both films, as is applicable to much of the director’s filmography, deal with issues of class and solidarity, but it finds the filmmaker returning to his affinity for monsters – The Host (2006), Okja (2017) – and dystopian sci-fi; Snowpiercer (2013).  Looking at it this way, Parasite seems to be the outlier rather than the cornerstone of this body of work as even Memories of Murder (2003), despite its subject matter, has more than its fair share of moments of levity as a pair of bumbling cops investigate the Lee Choon-jae murders. 

Pattinson leads the film, framing the narrative with his voiceover for much of the first half as we learn the rules of the world.  He plays Mickey somewhere in the crossroads of affable and dimwitted, adopting an almost lispy affectation to his voice that takes some time getting used to.  Continuing his streak of working with in-demand auteurs and crafting a kaleidoscopic image for himself, the performance delivered is not bad, just odd, and it struggles to find its place in a film that was built off of this character, but does not seem an organic environment for him.  Nevertheless, Pattinson provides one of the few throughlines of the film for audiences to grasp hold of, but the script is so wide that even though he is delivering a mostly enjoyable take on this pseudo-indestructible character, audiences always feel a little lost in space as the narrative continues to unfold rapidly around and beyond Mickey. 

It is not a particularly deep cutting story, so coupled with this additional lack of focus, Mickey 17 feels a little bit like it is about everything and nothing at the same time, and when stretched to nearly two and a half hours, the aimlessness settles down like a weight on its audience. The social commentary which the film is clearly engaging in is similarly broad so that while Ruffalo and his sauce-obsessed wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) are punching bags for the out-of-touch ruling class, they are too toothless and goofy to really feel like their actions are being wielded as actual satire.  That is not to say that the film is thoughtless – perhaps there was something lost in translation and that their antics will seem more precise to a South Korean audience, or it could be simply that this script was clearly written long before Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s ascendancy in United States and global politics that far out-zanies anything that a screenwriter could hope to come up with – but the generic silliness shown by the wider cast undermines whatever messaging the film is, genuinely and in good faith, trying to convey. 

It brings to mind on of Joon-ho’s contemporaries, Yorgos Lanthimos, and while it is not like he has never gotten sidetracked by his own colorful tones, the Greek provocateur tends to have a meaner streak coursing through his narratives; something that is missing here. Couple this with the fact that Ruffalo’s last feature role was for a similarly portrayed, pompous, empty-headed, braggart of a character in Poor Things (2023), the consequence-less, all’s-well-that-ends-well world which Mickey 17 is set does little to serve the messaging of the film well, and the cast further struggles with the stakes-less aspect of Mickey. If something bad happens, Mickey will just be re-printed so let Marshal huff and puff all he wants. In real life, the manic mood swings and flagrant incompetence shown off by our leaders – sometimes in a stream of rapid fire, early AM tweets – have consequence, so it is hard to apply the lessons of the film when one tries to divorce it from the rather safe narrative environment which the film takes place. This consequently weakens the message even more as audiences struggle to cope and can quickly throw in the towel on trying to find something deeper only to be met with an equally hard to reconcile sci-fi comedy/adventure.

Beyond the politics, there is another plot that bookends the film involving “creepers,” alien creatures that are armadillo-like in their appearance and protective of their home planet.  In typical fashion, Joon-ho’s monsters are cute even if they match the dull grey/white/black palate of the film.  These “aliens” need to be eradicated at all costs according to Marshall, and to hear him rant about the plight which they cause as he gesticulates and pouts, the allusions to Trump are unmistakable but these creatures are not engaging with Mickey 17 in the same way that the human characters are.  They fit much more in line with Mickey’s daffy nature and tone creating some thematic continuity across the film, but when they are tasked with shouldering the weight of metaphor, it simply rolls off of their armor plated backs and into the deep, grey nothingness. Had the film focused more on populating the planet and growing a new society that could live and work in tandem with these creatures, the film could preach much the same message while staying more tonally level and feel more cohesive.   

Mickey 17 is a film with plenty of ideas, but it struggles in its pacing and its management of tone so that it all becomes a blur without much definition.  This extends to the visual nature of the film, too, with elements like the creepers or the human printing machine, expertly realized by production designer Fiona Crombie and acting as cornerstones in the narrative, but everything heaped upon top of that feels mushier than we have come to expect from the typically meticulous Joon-ho and is further alienated by Darius Khondji‘s conscious choice to shoot everything in such a drab – yet not dingey, and also not clinical – shade of grey.  That being said, a swing and a miss can still be an exciting play, and this is true here, too.  Looking forward at a rather uninspired, super-hero and sequel heavy slate, Mickey 17 is a daring and refreshing experiment, robustly funded by a major studio and released wide, and while it is hard to say that it works on all levels, it is undeniably a singular experience at the cinema.