Bong Joon Ho
On general release
In Mickey 17, Robert Pattinson stars as the “expendable” Mickey. Put him in harm’s way and if he dies, you can just print another. And for human colonists on the ice planet of Niflheim, there is plenty of harm to get into. There’s the cold. And the general lack of everything, so the settlers must count every calorie and weigh every metal shaving. Most troublesome are the weevil-like creatures that chomp through the planet’s ice and rock. What they will do to the humans’ tin-can settlement is anyone’s guess.
Mickey has been reprinted 16 times already, mostly because medical researchers have been vivisecting him in their effort to cure a plague. The one thing that doesn’t kill him, ironically, is falling into a crevasse and being swallowed by a weevil. Who saw that coming? Certainly not the other colonists: when Mickey returns to camp, he finds he has already been reprinted. And “multiples” aren’t permitted…
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As science fiction MacGuffins go, this one is nearly a century old, its seeds sown by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. And we can’t say director Bong Joon Ho, celebrated for savage social satires like Parasite and Snowpiercer, “rediscovered” it. Actor Sam Rockwell turned in an unforgettable tour de force as two hapless engineers in Duncan Jones’s Moon over 15 years ago.
The point about MacGuffins is that they are dead on arrival. They have no inner life, no point. They stir only when characters get hold of them and use them to reveal who they are. Take invisibility. It’s hard to conceive of an idea more boring, yet H. G. Wells’s invisible man is a figure out of nightmare – one that, to judge by the number of movie remakes, the culture cannot get out of its head.
The one thing that doesn't kill Mickey is falling into a crevasse and being swallowed by a weevil
What does Ho say with his “multiples” MacGuffin? It depends where you look. For the most satisfying cinematic experience, keep your eyes fixed on Pattinson. Asked to play a man who has died 16 or 17 times already, he turns in two quite independent performances, wildly different from each other and both utterly convincing. Mickey 17 is crushed by his deaths; Mickey 18 is rubbed raw to screaming by them.
Pattinson aside, all in all, Mickey 17 is embarrassingly bad. It takes a bright, breezy, blackly comic novel by Edward Ashton, strips out its cleverness and gives us Mark Ruffalo’s unfunny Donald Trump impression as the colony leader and Naomi Ackie (as the Mickeys’ love interest) inexplicably throwing a foul-mouthed hissy fit.
Anyone who read Ashton’s book and watched Ho’s Snowpiercer might be forgiven for expecting Mickey 17 to be a marriage made in cinema heaven. For one brief moment in its 2-hour-and-17-minute run-time, a cruelly comic dinner party scene seems about to tip us into a much better film – a satire on power and hunger.
Then Tim Key turns up in a pigeon costume. I adore Key, but sticking him in a pigeon costume in the hope it will make him even funnier is as wrong-headed as it is insulting to his talent.
When a film goes this badly awry, you have to wonder what happened in the editing suite. My guess is that some bright spark from the studio decided the film was too difficult for its audience.
Oh, enough! I’m done. Even the weevils were a disappointment. In the book, they were maliciously engineered giant centipedes. How, I ask you, could a famously visual film-maker not even have embraced them?
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Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer. Follow him on X @simonings
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