2025 | rated R | starring Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette | directed by Bong Joon Ho | 2 hr 17 mins | 3 out of 5 stars |
Poor and a little dumb, Mickey (Robert Pattinson) volunteers to take a job as an “expendable” on a human expedition to colonize a frozen-over alien planet. As an expendable he becomes a human Guinea pig to test the space, air and food of potentially dangerous alien worlds usually leading to his death and a clone of himself and his consciousness re-printed (literally) and put back to work. That is, until one day when left for dead Mickey doesn’t die, but the clone is created anyway leaving Mickey version 17 to contend with Mickey version 18. Meanwhile, the planet starts to be overrun with alien bugs and the tech mogul leader that runs the colony, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, hamming it up) and his dutiful wife, Yfla (Toni Collette, also hamming it up) seek to wage war on the beasts not knowing their destructive power.
Bong Joon Ho’s first film after conquering Hollywood and being given a hero’s welcome upon his return to South Korea with an armful of Oscars for Parasite, Mickey 17 is the kind of dark, weird, messy movie Ho was making before he got famous. It is one of the most original and pure science fiction films of the year, but it also could have used another pass through the script and a slightly more judicious editor to help wrangle in Ho’s fertile imagination. The filmmaker still has creativity to burn here, it’s just this time the chemical balance between comedy and satire doesn’t quite gel.
Starting off with Mickey himself, played with a doe-eyed goofballness from Pattinson getting to flex some rarely seen comic muscles. Mickey is such a likeable stooge that all the ways the company abuses, tests and kills him off land far crueler than they are funny. Instead of playing these deaths as Groundhog Day style cartoons, Ho leans hard into the graphic details of it that gives the movie a meanspirited streak. In the past, Ho has been able to balance the darkness and the comedy better than this. Here the environmental satirist of Okja seems out for blood, no longer willing to take on both sides of a dilemma, but spun into attack mode where everyone is an over-the-top cartoonishly good or evil caricature.
Which brings me to Mark Ruffalo, so funny as the increasingly flustered womanizer of Poor Things, taking a version of that up to a hissing, spitting 11. Ruffalo’s tech mogul character storyline is just one of several that crash through this movie: from the murderous henchmen chasing after Mickey and Timo (Steven Yeun) to the legal quandary of the duplicate clones running around to Mickey’s romance with Nasha (Naomi Ackie) threatened by the more assertive Mickey 18, and then the How to Train Your Dragon story of the alien bugs that aren’t a threat after all. The movie is always busy, very chaotic and seems to accidently be in a half-hazard order that doesn’t quite come together in a satisfying way. Ho is indulgent here, burning his Oscar credit on a silly project of his own and all of the usual elements are there, but he’s usually working tighter than this. Meaning, even when the characters and the movie was an over-the-top cartoon, the film was slick, efficient and cleverly constructed. Not so here, and it’s hard to get the nasty taste out of your mouth that Ho hates everyone on screen here, even his protagonist.
Mickey 17 may go down as a standout film of 2025 as it’s one of the few that isn’t a sequel or a remake or a legacy sequel. It’s a fully realized original story straight from the mind of a natural born storyteller and filmmaker. That alone almost makes what Bong Joon Ho is trying to do here worth watching. You’re not going to see anything quite like it this year. For good or for bad.