The seventeenth version of Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) serves as the narrator and inspiration for Mickey 17. Mickey looks for a place on a space colonization mission to the planet Niflheim, which is headed by failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and heavily crewed by his cult-like devotees, after his childhood friend Timo (Steven Yeun) puts them both in debt with a loan shark who enjoys seeing his debtors die horribly. Timo uses his new pilot's license to get a spot, but Mickey is the only one applying for the Expendable post, making him stand out.
Mickey's consciousness and memories are recorded, and his body is scanned and kept. Every time he passes away, a machine recreates his body, uploads his most recent brain save, and presto—Mickey is born again. With the jerky crudeness of your at-home printer retracting a piece of paper, Pattinson's semi-protruding body is pulled back with a couple clicks, and I knew right away that Bong's film was for me. Sometimes a young scientist who is more engaged in his video games supervises this process, and when he is really preoccupied, new Mickey is permitted to hit the floor with a squishy thud.
Though space is a gray area and an expendable is perfect for high-risk research, ethical, philosophical, legal, and religious issues have made this technology prohibited on Earth. In a darkly humorous montage, for instance, Mickey 17 describes how a number of earlier Mickeys perished in order to create a vaccination against a deadly infection found on the surface of Niflheim. These sacrifices, along with his relationship with security agent Nasha (Naomi Ackie), whose affection with him has endured over his numerous incarnations, give him a tenuous sense of purpose.
Mickey 17's network of interests expands as the story goes on. Mickey is assigned to retrieve a specimen of the Creeper, a natural monster of Niflheim that resembles a Lovecraftian pill insect and can grow from a tiny dog to a wooly mammoth. He is thought to be dead when he falls into a crevice and is swarmed, but the aliens actually throw him back out into the snow. Upon his return to the ship, Seventeen finds that he has been reproduced, giving rise to the feared Multiples. He and 18 will both be killed and Mickey's data will be completely erased if the police discover it.
It would take more room than I have here to untangle all of the satirical targets that Bong manages to thread together over the film's duration. Much of Mickey 17's strangeness stems from the exaggerated performances of Ruffalo's politician and his
wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), who evoke the cartoonish evil of Snowpiercer's baddies. Both of them struck a chord with me, particularly as the
movie progresses; Poor Things appears to have given Ruffalo a sense of comedic abandon that I hope he keeps exploring.
Mickey's position in the ship's society exposes
corporate work culture; the Science team talks about the physical horrors Mickey is going to encounter as if they were on a regular conference call. What most immediately reminds me of Okja is the Creepers' involvement in the film. The humor wanes and Mickey 17's sarcasm becomes more acrid when their connection with the human settlers is dramatized.
Mickey 17 is its exploration of how an exploitative society pushes a message of worthlessness on its workers, and how the simplest, most powerful act of resistance is not to believe it.
Ratings: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
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