Mickey 17, the latest Boon Joon Ho film since Parasite (2019), opens unpleasantly enough. Viewers are immediately introduced to Robert Pattinson as Mickey being killed over and over again. He is an “expendable” on a space colony ship, which means that he is responsible for doing all the extremely dangerous jobs like exterior ship repair and… freezing to death in test chambers. Many of these jobs result in death. Thankfully for us, every time Mickey dies, he is unceremoniously reprinted from a machine that works more like a traditional laser printer than a hi-tech biological miracle. The human printing machine jams and stalls and unceremoniously plops the reborn Mickey onto the floor when the scientists responsible for printing him inevitably forget to pull out the tray. After birth, Mickey’s memories are reuploaded to his brain from a literal brick hard drive, and then he is put back to work.
When I say that the start of this movie is unpleasant, I mean it. Between the awful panorama of deaths and the grotesque human printing process, I admit I was squirming a bit in my seat and wondering if I had made a mistake choosing this film blind. But stick with the movie, because it manages to transition from horrific to sexy pretty quickly. Naomi Ackie’s character (Nasha) is introduced, and the two leads immediately begin a sex sequence overlayed by a galactic Trump speech. It’s hilarious, weirdly sensual, and a perfectly timed break from the drudgery of the film’s opening. We learn that Mickey and Nasha are going steady on the ship, making sweet love every chance they get and supporting one another through all the bullshit that the voyage throws at them. Maybe it is a little too sweet, maybe its even corny, but giving Mickey a sickly sweet romantic motivation is the glue that keeps this movie from being depressing.
While the film starts as a madcap space comedy, its depth as a work of science fiction begins to bear some teeth as the colonists reach their destination on a distant frozen planet. They send out Mickey to test the air, and he immediately contracts a pathogen that has him puking blood and dead in minutes. They send him out again to make sure. Then they use the results from these tests to concoct a vaccine. Then that vaccine fails so they send him out again. And again. Eventually, they get it right and the colonists are able to explore the surface of their new world without masks. Also there are aliens on the planet that look a lot like the spitters from Factorio. I don’t think this is a coincidence at all.
The implications of the human printing technology are delved into further when Mickey 17, who was supposed to be eaten by aliens, manages to actually survive and return to the ship. There, he discovers that another Mickey has already been printed. They immediately try to kill each other. An insane fight sequence that pins Robert Pattinson against himself unfolds, and one of them is nearly incinerated in the ship’s biological recycling system. This fight is really beautiful, two identical bodies fighting in the bowls of a ship, illuminated crimson by gaping pits of boiling hot lava. One Mickey pins the other, another goes for a death blow to the head. Finally, one of them ends up hanging for dear life in one of the pits. It’s like Star Wars Episode V redone, when Luke and Vader go at it in the Cloud City underbelly. Also, Robert Pattinson gets kind of scary and reminds me of Jim Carry’s The Mask.
It is during this fight that I lost track of which Mickey was which. 17 and 18 supposedly have distinct personalities, but I believe they get swapped at this point. Biologically, they are identical. Mentally, they are distinct in some ways, but they possess the same memories and motivations. The movie goes on to explore this double situation further, but I won’t give up all the juicy details. Two primary concerns emerge: there are multiple Mickeys, which is illegal in this universe, and the planet has other life on it that the colonists now have to contend with.
You’ll notice this right away in your own watch, but this movie is very political. Like, in an immediately relevant way. The leader of the space mission is played by Mark Ruffalo doing a hand over fist Trump impression the entire time. He espouses a doctrine of “Two Bodies, One Soul” that dictates that despite technological advancements that allow for an infinite number of copies of people to be created, humans only have one soul and therefor should only have one body at a time. The distinction is arbitrary of course. I wonder if any of the dogmas of our own time are arbitrary religious contrivances meant to hold back the chaos of rapid advancement? With science we can already manipulate embryos, change genders, and clone organisms. Many governments around the world forbid these practices out of fear of changing humanity. We can communicate instantly across the globe and associate with people in multiple continents at the same time, yet borders and countries still exist. Technology is not inherently liberating.
These questions form the basis of cyberpunk films like Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell, which depict high tech societies that nonetheless suffer the same issues of systemic poverty and class inequality that our current world suffers. Mickey 17 takes on this tradition in its own way by revealing a world that is impoverished even in the face of miracles of science. The human printing machine is really an immortality machine, yet is is only used to reproduce drone humans born to die over and over again. The very fact that the human printer can bypass natural birthing is a major driver of its relegation to colonial work in the universe of the film. Mark Ruffalo’s Trump is obsessed with the idea of building a natalist colony that reproduces with natural sex.
The other concern of the ladder half of the film is the issue of colonization itself. The planet that the crew arrives on is, of course, loaded with natives. These natives aren’t animals despite their appearance. They are intelligent and can even be communicated with. The fact that the movie is able to contrive a translation device in minutes isn’t even very far fetched anymore– with AI, the obstacle of translation has shrunk considerably. Despite all of this, Ruffalo Trump is eager to escalate to annihilation. The crew prepares a toxic gas to eliminate the natives. Trump’s wife also circumcises the tails of one of the alien babies and eats it? I’m going to leave the inferences to you guys.
The climactic end of the film comes on fast with these two dilemmas at the fore: alien natives about to be exterminated, two illegal Mickeys about to be executed. I won’t spoil further. Things wrap up neatly enough, but the political questions at the heart of the film remain even after the credits role. In Joon Ho fashion, the ending is Hollywood in the least fulfilling way possible. The Korean guy is making fun of us again!