Having to work at a terrible job out of desperation—a job you hate that is a daily kind of humiliation and destruction of body and spirit—seems to be so common in our world that it has become the norm for many people.
And at first glance, Mickey 17 may seem like just a radical critique of the modern laborer in the dominant corporate culture, but this latest film from Academy Award-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite, Snowpiercer) does that and much more.
The film’s many mirrored angles give us a host of parodic views of things we face in our own troubled global socio-economic culture. It investigates a person with crushing debt who takes a job that is literally a cycle of grisly deaths and Frankenstein reincarnations designed for knowledge and profit—with a few wry laughs along the way.
An odd mix of religious ideas and science, human and alien rights, dangerously out-of-control corporate expansion and colonization, Mickey 17 delivers all this and more. Ultimately, it’s about the redemptive power of love. Yes, it’s a love story.
‘Mickey 17’ has it all, including a haunting and humorous soundtrack by Jung Jae-il.”
The film is based on the novel Mickey 7 by Ashton Edward, who had the idea to write about “a crappy immortality within an exploitative social structure.” Immortality exists in two realms in human thought: religion and science. In Bong’s film the two are combined into an entity, One and Only, which is sometimes referred to as a church and sometimes as a company (think of the Company from the Alien movies with some corny hymns and services added).
While One and Only is a for-profit corporation, its underpinnings are comically religious and darkly fanatical. This company, with its off-world exploration and colonization, becomes the last hope of Mickey Barnes, an endearingly dopey everyman played with a nerdy voice by Robert Pattinson.
Barnes is talked into investing everything he has in a macaron company during a time of economic upheaval by his best friend, Timo. Steven Yeun (Beef; The Walking Dead) plays Timo, a fortunate opportunist living a charmed life who doesn’t seem to quite understand what friendship is. He doesn’t seem very concerned about his buddy’s well-being at all, and even he begins to see Mickey as a renewable commodity as the story progresses.
While Timo gets a dream job as a shuttle pilot, unlucky Mickey becomes an “expendable.” Illegal on earth, expendables are allowed “one per” on any other planet. Corporations may drain their workers of soul and slowly destroy their bodies over time, but here it happens fast, and then it happens again, and again, and again.
The body printing process is one of the central ideas and plot movers in the film. Whenever Mickey dies, his stored memories and genetic codes are downloaded into a newly-made body, printed out from a giant tube device that looks like a repurposed MRI machine. We get some great sequences of Mickey’s head and shoulders emerging from the tube and doing the abrupt and arhythmic jerking as if he were a human sheet of paper coming out of a laser printer.
This printing process (think cloning) is the immortality, and Bong’s film wrestles with the idea from the bio-ethics angle while decorating key scenes in the movie with religious imagery and notions.
When the workers from One and Only are boarding the spaceship bound for the aptly-named planet Niflheim, we get a beautiful camera shot of a giant circular staircase coiling up into the heavens. It looks like a vivid representation of the souls climbing the mountain of purgatory in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
In Norse mythology Niflheim is a realm of ice and mists inhabited by snow giants and mysterious creatures, often having some overlap with the notion of hell. At the heart of the film we have samsara, the death and rebirth cycle from Hindu and Buddhist systems. We even get a sci-fi pieta toward the end of the movie as the character Nasha cradles Mickey’s head while he is suffering in jets of poison gas.
Nasha, played by Naomi Ackie (Star Wars IX: Rise of Skywalker), is another new One and Only employee who scores a job as a security agent. She is smart, tough, and beautiful, and more in love with Mickey than he is with her.
Many people think it would be great to have any kind of immortality, but here we see that immortality is not all it’s cracked up to be.”
The trouble really starts when Timo leaves Mickey for dead (“Nice knowing you. Have a nice death. See you tomorrow!”), but this 17th iteration of Mickey is saved by the planet’s scary but empathetic indigenous creatures, the creepers (imagine sow bugs, pug-sized and larger). It is Nasha who realizes the creepers are peaceful creatures and should not be subjected to genocide as directed by Marshall, a former congressman and two-time election loser played by Mark Ruffalo (Avengers: Infinity War).
A TV personality, businessman, and pseudo-religious guru, Marshall is the politico in charge of the expedition to Niflheim along with his (culinary) sauce-obsessed glam tramp wife, Ylfa, played by Toni Collette (The Sixth Sense, About a Boy). Ruffalo’s portrayal of Marshall is one of the most remarkable effects in this film. His speeches—to riled up audiences with a good smattering of bright red ball caps throughout—and all of his dialogue are delivered in the intonations, inflections, and cadences of Donald Trump with uncanny precision. Marshall also has the propensity to make outrageous, inane, and cliché statements with casual naivete and questionable conviction.
When One and Only prints a new Mickey (18) prematurely, we get a classic doppelgänger story. While Mickey 17 is naïve and passive, 18 is shrewd and hostile. While Mickey 17 thanks Marshall for serving him questionable genetically-modified steak, 18 wants revenge, and sets out to kill Marshall.
It’s this combination of Mickey 18’s fighting side with an unwavering and complete love of Nasha that completes Mickey 17’s identity. Nasha uses her intelligence, intuition, and empathy in a confrontation with Marshall, which no doubt many people would like to witness in real life: a brave Black woman cussing out the incompetent white male politician, calling him out on all of his stupid ideas and actions. In fact, one of the notable elements of this movie is white men being saved from themselves and from catastrophe by two women: Nasha and a non-native-English-speaking woman played by Anamaria Vartolomei (Being Maria).
Meanwhile, 18 uses his resourceful savagery and courage to stop the mass extinction of the creepers and overcome Marshall. These scenes are epic sweeps, and the stampeding creepers could be the buffalo on the Great Plains during the latter part of the 19th century in the U.S.
Mickey 17 has it all, including a haunting and humorous soundtrack by Jung Jae-il. Amid all of the violence, gore, and checked-out workers printing out new copies of Mickey, however, a viewer could miss some important aspects.
Many people think it would be great to have any kind of immortality, but here we see that immortality is not all it’s cracked up to be. And judging by a nightmarish premonition Mickey has of a new edition of Marshall being made, it’s hard not to think of the problem in its most terrible form: the philosophy of Eternal Return. One of its maxims, however, is that what is done out of love always occurs beyond good and evil.
While billed as sci-fi/dark comedy, Mickey 17 is, remember, a love story. In the end, Nasha’s ever-faithful, all-accepting love for both sides of Mickey prevails. In a cutely comic sequence, we see her thrilled that she has two very different versions of her lover. The comedy comes through as the film ends on an upward note, and we watch and can only hope our world can follow suit.
Editor’s Note: Mickey 17 is now playing at The SLO Film Center at the Palm Theatre.