Mickey 17 Is Like a Bad Clone of Snowpiercer

It’s been nearly six years since Korean master Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or on its way to becoming the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for best picture. Bong, who’s long been revered in Korea and among cult fandoms around the world, broke through a membrane to more mainstream renown. Essentially, he created his own tough act to follow, which perhaps explains why it took over a half a decade for his new film, Mickey 17, to reach theaters.

To be fair, the film wrapped production over two years ago, and was at some point cast into release-date limbo by its distributor, Warner Bros. It finally premiered at the Berlin Film Festival last month and will open in the United States on March 7. The question now is, was the wait worth it?

As ever, Bong creates an interesting, darkly idiosyncratic world in which to play around. In Mickey 17, he imagines a not-so-distant future of rampant capitalism, a dying Earth, desperate people conscripting themselves into terrible jobs in the hopes of fleeing to the relative safety of another planet. The worst career of all is as an Expendable, wherein a volunteer’s consciousness is uploaded to a server and preserved there so that they may die corporeally over and over again in the line of dangerous work. After their death, their body is reprinted and their mind downloaded into it. Die, rinse, repeat.

It’s a grimly comedic setup, given extra oddness by Robert Pattinson, who plays the titular character with a squawking accent and a nervous, awkward jitter. It’s another piece of big acting from Pattinson, who has, since his Twilight days, been admirably eager to stretch and transform himself, vanity be damned. In that way, he and Bong are an ideal match: the filmmaker’s characters are often real weirdos, steeped in a distinctly sideways, outsized sense of humor. That comedy doesn’t always translate from Korean to English well—look to Jake Gyllenhaal’s manic zoologist in Bong’s Okja—but Pattinson’s efforts still count for something.

If Pattinson doesn’t always land the joke, or if his accent falters, or if his performance (as, really, multiple Mickeys) sometimes strains legibility, we can at least appreciate the big swing. On the whole, though, Mickey 17 tests our patience. While the dispensable clones premise is intriguing, and opens a door to the kind of socioeconomic commentary so signature to Bong, the film quickly grows distracted by other matters entirely.

Mickey, a hapless loser fleeing a murderous moneylender, winds up on a spaceship bound for an icy planet. Once he and his fellow colonists arrive, they are confronted by nothing but snow and the local fauna: giant pill bug-looking creatures that at first seem like mere herd animals. The leader of the mission, a smarmy politician named Kenneth (Mark Ruffalo), disdains the planet’s inhabitants and wants only to prove his own grandiosity in establishing a new and glorious civilization. Thus ensues a clash between indigenous and invader, hoary if still terribly relevant subject matter. But Bong leans too hard on cliché to get his message out.

In addition to its conquest narrative, Mickey 17 clumsily swats at Trumpism—or, at least, a certain American chauvinism that bred Trumpism. The film arrives at a time quite different from when it was made, and in the harsh light of a second administration, Mickey 17’s satire of Kenneth’s noxious preening feels limp and inexact. The film speaks in dated vernacular, more gallows humor than horror. Most poorly served by the film’s parody is Toni Collette as Kenneth’s wife, Ylfa, whose sole characteristic is that she’s obsessed with rarefied culinary sauces. We get that gourmet foodie-ism is a gross trapping of the increasingly isolated rich, but a more developed idea would have been nice.

Naomi Acke, who plays one of the mission’s security agents and a love interest for Mickey, is also stuck with a faulty character. Her motivations are choppily rendered—as a lot of explicative detail was left on the cutting room floor. The whole of Mickey 17 is erratic in that way, jumping between plot points and thematic concerns with an uncontrolled irregularity.

What results is a film that is curiously, dismayingly dull. As always, Bong manages some arresting visuals—tiny humans running amidst a snowy stampede, the chilly hopelessness of an ice cave. But much of the film seems repurposed from Bong’s first English-language feature, Snowpiercer, only without any of that film’s arresting poignancy. Perhaps if Bong had focused on the clone idea, more intricately exploring the corporate world’s annihilating treatment of workers, he could have arrived at something rattling, even profound. Alas, he is ultimately too enamored of his wiggly animal creations, and by the broadest of jokes about TV camera-obsessed petty tyrants. In all its diminished attention span, Mickey 17 plays less like a new declaration from a great master and more like a feverish TikTok doom scroll leading nowhere.