Mickey 17
Year: 2025
Rating: R
Length: 137 minutes / 2.28 hours
I can appreciate when movies try to do something new. The trick is that I also want my movies to be an escape from reality. Science fiction is meant to ask tough questions about society, but sometimes I don’t think sci-fi looks far enough out when certain plots would be completely feasible in the near future. Mickey 17 (2025) basically answers the question, “When the poor have nothing else to give, what will capitalism do to them?” Answer: clone them as expendables for dangerous menial labor situations.
Acting-wise, Robert Pattinson carries this movie on his ability to truly pull off cloned versions of the same person with quite unique personalities. Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette are also great in their roles as a couple who use authoritarianism to subdue a population on an alien planet. Naomi Ackie and Steven Yeun were good too, but didn’t have the extremes the other characters were portraying. The aesthetic definitely felt like Bong Joon Ho wanted to re-create what he did with Snowpiercer (2013), just not on a train traveling infinitely across the earth.
What’s perhaps disappointing is the social commentary in Mickey 17 not nearly coming as close to the almost perfect Parasite (2019) that this director has shown he knows how to do. Authoritarian themes felt pulled out of current events (which themselves are highly reminiscent of 1940s Europe), and the environmental message was at least half-cribbed from movies like How to Train Your Dragon (2010) but with some potential links to Joon Ho’s Okja (2017) as well. Of course, all of this really falls apart when you consider that it’d likely be cheaper to just make a robot that could do these dangerous jobs than the resources it would take to clone a human to do it.
An OK sci-fi idea that has some flaws and hits a little too close to reality, I give Mickey 17 3.0 stars out of 5.
