Mickey 17
First screened and reviewed in March 2025
Director: Bong Joon-ho. Cast: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Steven Yeun, Anamaria Vartolomei, Pascal Ferran, Daniel Henshall, Tim Key, Steve Park, Michael Monroe, Cameron Britton, Edward Davis. Screenplay: Bong Joon-ho (based on the novel by Edward Ashton). In Brief:
Early wit and weirdo promise collapse spectacularly-and not spectacularly enough. Galactic jape turned wan protest rally.
VOR:③
Maybe too early to know? Bong's sensibility is hard to write off even when it's stalling. A few new images here, but precious few new ideas.
Nobody loves being lectured at, including by their own "side." Nor does anybody like being stultified by a movie that's forsaken any interesting surprises or directions with a solid two-thirds of its runtime left to go. The defining image of Mickey 17's last major chapter is a bunch of blurry shapes moving round and round in circles, observed from a nonspecific POV, and I'd call that very far from a coincidence.
It didn't have to be this way. The long pre-title sequence—17 minutes by my watch, which is neat if it's true—is pretty generous with jokes, with dramatic promise, and with intriguing outer-space milieus. Robert Pattinson, endlessly, admirably, and resourcefully amenable to his directors' most far-out asks, supplies just what Bong seems to be after: half workhorse, half schlemiel. He's charismatic enough that you want to keep watching him, sufficiently bland and defenseless that you believe he'd wind up with no better options in the near-ish future than to enroll as a somatechnic worker bee who can be 3D-printed afresh every time he meets a grim end.
Bong's trademark fury at economic exploitation and the violent, calloused society it produces and ceaselessly exacerbates are so ingrained in this concept that you're in no danger of missing the critique even as it's played for boot-black comedy ("Can you remove your gloves so we can see how soon the radiation poisoning manifests in your hands?") or submerged under other moods and generic tilts (political satire, sexual infatuation, PG-rated monster movie). The repeated spectacle of Pattinson's Mickey rolling out of his tubular rotisserie like a freshly grilled Potbelly sandwich doesn't even get tired after serial reprisals. Occasionally, the technicians around him forget about their print job, just like you do at your office, and Mickey just sort of flops out onto the floor.
I was pretty ready to follow Mickey 17 wherever after this witty, funny-spooky, super-sized beginning, but "wherever" is almost exactly where it goes. It's already not great that the least interesting or persuasive ingredient of that prologue—a species of extra-terrestrial Armadillidiidae who may be less carnivorous than feared—is the one with which Bong's script, adapted from Edward Ashton's novel, casts its lot. The most instantly wayward performance, yet another undisciplined, embarrassing outing in purple flamboyantry from Mark Ruffalo, making Meryl Streep in Don't Look Up seem wan and restrained, quickly bullies its way downstage, before the deeply unflattering footlights. Pattinson gets assigned to play two clones of himself, one dimmer, one more vicious, but despite his technically and tonally sound approach, the double-performance somehow pays half the reward. The sound mix, distractingly muddy in several passages, especially regarding dialogue, keeps wreaking havoc with a movie that's unfortunately heavy on expository speeches.
But the worse thing that happens, not unrecognizably from Bong's other outings in socially-conscious sci-fi, is that Mickey 17's giddy sprawl of disruptive possibilities shrivels down into a blunt-force screed. As with Avatar, oodles and oodles of cash, time, and labor have been expended on a gigantic convolution that could have fit into a tartly worded tweet—this time about colonialism, class stratification, and Prezzey 47. And the spectacles to which we are treated get more mundane and off-putting as Mickey 17 unfolds (and unfolds, and unfolds), whereas Cameron could at least be relied upon to dial things up. Everything alien in the movie's world gets harnessed into something humanoid and pedestrian; the plot literally contrives a vocal translator so that the guttural "language" of the extra-terrestrial roly-polies can speak the movie's themes, right around the time they reveal their anthropomorphic eyes. We went all the way to the other end of the galaxy with 18 Robert Pattinsons, and all we got was somebody's chaotic term paper for their Colonialism course, with an intro they carefully shaped for days followed by five disjointed pages they gunned out in the hours before the deadline and a conclusion that ends in a mid-sentence whimper?
I've been avoiding reviews, where I imagine Bong is taking some stick for getting in bed with Warner Bros. and repeating fair bits of Okja while he's at it. To that, I'd add a less popular opinion that his creature features and speculative fictions have chronically paid lower dividends than his policiers and domestic thrillers. I prefer Barking Dogs Don't Bite, the consensus "least" of the former group, to even The Host, the consensus favorite of the latter, and I'd personally be thrilled if his next project was set here and now with an all-biped cast. In three tries, Bong hasn't even designed a creature that delighted my eye or convinced me on screen.
That, to be fair, sounds like a "me" thing. And of course what I really want from a filmmaker as talented and eccentric as Bong is to follow his weird muse, whether or not we have the same favorite flavors or the same hopes from cinematic storytelling. By all means, keep Bonging, Bong! I'm just saying that however many unique and creatively infelicitous pressures might have operated on Mickey 17, and however many good ideas and zesty accents are still discernible in the film, not all of its flaws feel unprecedented. To me, Bong finding what's bestial inside hyperbolic but recognizable humans, backed into desperate corners they both have and haven't built themselves, is always more interesting than Bong just showing us beasts. And Bong finding what's deeply, hauntingly weird in something that passed temporarily as real-world drama is definitely more interesting than Bong blaring out familiar dogmas—even if I believe in those dogmas!—in what had promised to be intractably weird. Grade:C
