Mickey 17 (2025)

Rated R for being generally pretty vulgar, a lot of death (albeit mostly comical), some torture of animals, sexual stuff including nudity, drug use, and basically everything you can think of.  Bong Joon Ho tends not to hold back on his films and Mickey 17 is no exception.  I will say that despite all of the questionable content, much of the movie has a tone that makes these moments seem less offensive than other films.

DIRECTOR: Bong Joon Ho

We should thank my wife for refusing to go to bed at a reasonable hour because this is making me be quasi-productive.  While it is doubtful that I'll get an entire blog done about Mickey 17 before I give up and return to Star Wars: Outlaws, I'm semi-thrilled that I have this page formatted and I'll be more encouraged to write about this at a later time.

I might be too much of a fan of Bong Joon Ho.  The man is a genius.  That's not me blowing smoke his way.  It's almost like the entire film community treats Director Bong with a level of respect that is reserved for the the true auteurs out there.  The thing about Director Bong that I do have to admit is that, as much I look forward to his movies, I also understand that I give him a pass.  For every The Host or Parasite, there are movies that I only appreciate but don't really enjoy.  Okja kind of falls into that category.  Maybe Snowpiecer as well.  Nah, I enjoyed Snowpiercer.  But you get where I'm going with this.  It's that kind of hero worship that makes me want to give him the pass.  The thing is, I heard that Mickey 17 wasn't that great.  

But do you understand how much that makes me want to love the movie more?  I think a lot of us out there are wired to be contrarians.  We want to be the one who loved the stinker a little bit.  Now,  I don't think that many people think that MIckey 17 is a straight-up stinker.   I just know that people have been less than enthusiastic about it.  And do you know what?  I'm kind of in the same camp.  Mickey 17 is an incredibly ambitious movie that does a couple of things wrong , which is a bummer because this movie should be on a list of top movies based on the talent involved.  But instead, I'm going to write a blog explaining why I just didn't care that much.  

That being said, I'd love if my wife went to bed so I can play Star Wars.  

I'm not sure which point bothers me more:  the fact that the movie didn't really need its conceit or the fact that it is hitting a lot of the same buttons that Director Bong has already touched on.  I suppose that I'll start with the central premise.  For those who aren't in the know, Mickey is an Expendable.  In a world that has outlawed cloning, Mickey is allowed to be cloned as a lower class grunt.  He's put in intentionally dangerous situations where safety would be a concern and often killed to take shortcuts on the way to a new world where the people are forming a new colony.  That's fascinating.  Do you know why it's fascinating?  Because I want to write a book about cloning and that conceit would be fun to touch upon.  But here's the deal:  Director Bong never really plumbs the depths of this concept.  There are moments where there are hints about the value of life or a soul.  But really, a lot of Mickey's deaths are to push the story along or to provide comic relief.  It's weird because Bong is often really in tune with these kinds of ideals.  If anything, he gives more individuality to the creepers as opposed to Mickey.   It's just that it seems like the narrative should be about this guy who experiences death like it is commonplace.  What does that do to someone?  

Instead, the movie almost goes the Multiplicity route and makes a joke out of the fact that each itieration of Mickey acts a little bit differently.  Like, we've seen that before.  And as much fun as it is for the audience, I kind of feel like Director Bong is doing that more for Robert Pattinson.  Like, it's an acting exercise.  The reason that we all loved Orphan Black was because we saw Tatiana Maslany plays variations on the same person.  I'm not saying that these characters can't have degrees of personality.  But I also feel that the writing (I'm not blaming Pattinson because that dude has proven himself) treats these characters more like archetypes rather than fully broken down characters.

(Note:  My wife finally went to bed, so I proceeded to play Star Wars: Outlaws for a few hours.) 

Like, Director Bong has always been so adept at telling stories that peel away comfort levels and remind us what it means to be human.  And it seems like this movie was so rife for breakdown that to see a slightly more version of Multiplicity just feels like a bit of a letdown.  Maybe I've just been spoiled a bit too much by Black Mirror, but this is a movie that fundamentally questions the role of mortality.  I was always a little mad at that movie from the late '90s or early 2000s, The 6th Day, which toyed with the idea of immortality through cloning.  Right there is a story about treating the body like it is simply meat and it never really got to the heart of what death's relationship to life is.  Mickey 17 is committing the same sin.  The only reason that Mickey cares about his 17th body is because he is at risk at never being printed again.  That's mildly interesting, but it doesn't really challenge us, does it?

And part of the reason that I'm wrong about all of this is because Mickey is meant to not be a typical protagonist.  He's a goober.  That's part of the movie.  We aren't gifted with a protagonist who has these deep thoughts.  He reacts.  He survives.  The movie is about the painfully ordinary thrown into the farthest version of the extraordinary.  Part of that is interesting, I suppose.  But I don't want the heavy conversation avoided because someone along the way thought that we're going to keep the audience wanting more as a bit of a prank.  Mickey isn't fascinating enough to really leave me satisfied for the questions that should be asked.  Mickey 1 was afraid of death.  Mickey 17 says that death is terrible and scary, but we don't really have that emotional beat to allow that statement have any emotional relevance.

The other major thing that bothers me is the fact that we've kind of done this before.  I've mentioned briefly that there's a lot of correlation with Okja.  Part of me has to make peace with this.  A good indication that a director is an auteur is that we have similar themes, styles, and motifs between films.  Clearly, Bong Joon Ho is an environmentalist who scorns man's apathy towards their relationship with the rest of the planet.  We keep coming back to this well.  The problem is that Mickey 17 already has a million balls in the air.  Besides Mickey's odd relationship with death, there's this Trump allegory (which, I need to talk about, so please remind me), the role of celebrity, a very bizarre girlfriend who really isn't explained, a mob boss plot, a drug dealing plot, a war between species.  I'm sure that this is done intentionally.  Again, I understand that Director Bong is way smarter than I am.  But still, it's just another thread on an already undercooked science fiction movie that doesn't need half the beats it throws out there.

Okay, let's talk Mark Ruffalo's Trump allegory.  He and Toni Colette (who seems to be more of a Marjorie Taylor Greene type more than a Melania) do these over-the-top, self-obsessed political figureheads who have serious pride and anger issues.  Now, I know that Bong Joon Ho tends to make his upper crust oligarchs caricatures.  But the thing is, and this is me being angry as heck right now, as much as Ruffalo is going over-the-top with this characterization of Trump...he's not going far enough.  Because as dumb and evil as this character is...Trump is actually dumber.  There are moments where Kenneth Marshall is aware of a lot more than he appears to know, making him more evil than dumb.  Trump is that weird combination of dumb and evil in equal measure.

​Anyway, it's just a movie that seems so rushed and not sure what it is actually doing.  While it was watchable, it might be my least favorite Bong Joon Ho movie.