Crew
Director/Screenplay – Bong Joon Ho, Based on the Novel Mickey7 (2022) by Edward Ashton, Producers – Bong Joon Ho, Dooho Choi, Dede Gardner & Jeremy Kleiner, Photography – Darius Khondji, Music – Jung Jaeil, Visual Effects Supervisor – Dan Glass, Visual Effects – DNeg (Supervisor – Chris McLaughlin), Framestore (Supervisor – Stuart Penn), Rising Sun Pictures (Supervisor – Guido Wolter) & Turncoat Pictures, Special Effects Supervisor – Dominic Tuohy, Creeper Design – Jang Heechul, Production Design – Fiona Crombie. Production Company – Plan B Entertainment/Offscreen Productions/Kate Street Picture Company.
Cast
Robert Pattinson (Mickey 17/Mickey 18/Mickey Barnes), Naomi Ackie (Nasha Barridge), Mark Ruffalo (Kenneth Marshall), Toni Collette (Ylfa Marshall), Steven Yuen (Timo), Patsy Ferran (Dorothy), Annamaria Vartolomei (Kai Katz), Daniel Henshall (Preston), Cameron Britton (Arkady), Holliday Grainger (Red Hair), Bronwyn James (Receptionist), Stephen Park (Zeke), Thomas Turgoose (Bazooka Soldier)
Plot
The year 2050. To get away from a loanshark pursuing them for debts, Mickey Barnes and his friend Timo sign up for an expedition to colonise the planet Niflheim led by the ex-senator Kenneth Marshall. The only position that Mickey can fill is that of an Expendable, someone who is used for the most dangerous missions, including exposure to radiation and poisons that will kill him whereupon he is then reprinted from waste organics and memories implanted into his head. During the voyage, Mickey forms an attachment to security officer Nasha Barridge. The ship lands on the ice planet Niflheim. Native aliens are discovered, which Marshall nicknames Creepers. While out on an expedition, Mickey 17 falls down a crevasse and is abandoned, only for the Creepers to come and rescue him. Mickey returns to the ship to find he has been presumed dead and a new copy of him has been printed. Back on Earth, multiples (more than one copy of an individual) are regarded as highly illegal. Nasha and the Mickeys try to hide this, but problems are caused when Marshall declares war on the Creepers, determined to exterminate them.
South Korea’s Bong Joon Ho has become a name to reckon with on the international stage throughout the 2010s. Bong’s found festival play with his first two films Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) and Memories of Murder (2003) based on a true-life Korean serial killer investigation, as well as the Shaking Tokyo episode of the anthology Tokyo! (2008). His next, the monster movie The Host (2006), became a sensation and accolades continued to pour in with Mother (2009), the science-fiction film Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017) about the relationship between a young girl and a genetically-engineered pig, culminating in the Academy Award-winning success of Parasite (2019). Bong’s latest Mickey 17 is co-produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B production company, who also backed Bong’s Okja.
Bong Joon Ho adapts a novel Mickey7 (2022) by Edward Ashton, who has also written a sequel to it. The story tackles the subject of Clones and Cloning. There have been a variety of films on cloning themes ranging from the smart and clever likes of The Boys from Brazil (1978), Never Let Me Go (2010), Womb (2010), Elizabeth Harvest (2018), LX 2048 (2020) and the tv series Orphan Black (2013-7).
If you strip Mickey 17 down, the core of the plot about a clone being stuck with an identity realisation that there is an inconvenient double of themself is not too different a one to the plot we have had in many of these – see the likes of The Clones (1973), The 6th Day (2000), The Reconstruction of William Zero (2004) and Dual (2022), as well as the earlier seasons of Orphan Black. Even the expendable clone turns up in other works such as Never Let Me Go and Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979).
Nevertheless, the characters of Mickey 17 and 18 are ones that are uniquely science-fictional and original. Mickey is the core of the film – and one where it is hard not to have sympathy for poor Robert Pattinson during the early scenes where we see him being subject to a variety of experimental processes that kill him, where he is dismissively told that he is resurrected from discarded meat or with technicians being so sloppy that are not even paying attention as he emerges from the printer.
Bong Joon Ho can be guaranteed to create a fascinating and original film no matter the genre he is dabbling in. He creates an absorbingly colourful world around his characters written with a characteristically wry and sarcastic touch. In films such as Snowpiercer and Parasite, Bong’s concern is for social hierarchies between the haves and havenots and this touches on many of his regular themes. In many ways, Mickey 17 resembles a re-run of Snowpiercer – a group of people in a frozen world trapped in a vehicle where resources are limited and the society is run by comic caricatures of crazed authority and where those at the bottom of the rung proceed to conduct a revolution against the forces of authority and liberate their world. During the scenes with Mickey 17 and 18, there is something of the society hiding in the walls of a regular household that we get in Parasite. Toni Collette’s determination to serve the Creepers as a sauce and the torturous killing of the young Creepers recall much Bong’s meat-eating horrors in the latter half of Okja.
As the authority figure, Mark Ruffalo is quite in his element, puffed up, his entire rhetoric viewed in terms of performance for the tv camera, one that Bong hastens to assure is not based on any contemporary politicians. Toni Collette gives an equally grotesque and awful performance as his wife. There is a particularly bizarrely funny scene where Robert Pattinson is invited to dinner by Ruffalo, which becomes the opportunity for the two of them to test out a poisoned printed meat, only for everything to go hilariously sideways.
However, it is the younger leads we are drawn to. Robert Pattinson confirms himself as a performer of great talent. Ever since coming to fame and been regarded as a teen heartthrob in Twilight (2008) and sequels, Pattinson has defied playing to commercial expectations and instead made a point of working with directors who make strong and individualistic work such as David Cronenberg, Claire Denis, Robert Eggers, Christopher Nolan, Anton Corbijn and Werner Herzog. In many ways, Mickey 17 can be seen as Pattinson Dead Ringers (1988) film. Certainly, the visual effects that go in to allowing the two Pattinsons to interact as everyday characters is one that we never for a moment question. The other bright and talented face that almost gets overlooked is Naomie Ackie, who caught my attention ever since tv’s The End of the Fucking World (2017-9), a role that is almost unrecognisable from the plays that she plays here.
(Nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor (Robert Pattinson) at this site’s Best of 2025 Awards).
Trailer here