There is a telling scene toward the end of Bong Joon Ho’s much delayed, much anticipated Mickey 17. In it, the titular 17 (Robert Pattinson) stands shivering on the loading dock of his spaceship over the snow planet Niflheim. Beside him is his clone, Mickey 18 (Robert Pattinson), just as burdened by gadgetry and the convoluted, interwoven plots that got him there as his partner.
The two are strapped with explosives, equipped with machetes and on the hunt for “sauce” from the circling mob of pill-bug aliens — all elements introduced from scattered, incomplete b-plots that have only now had a chance to converge. And turning to his partner, 17 introduces yet another element.
He brings up a memory he can’t help but hold on to: The mysterious red button he pushed as a child, long before he became a clone — the one on the dashboard of his mother’s car, which lead to the accident that killed her.
“I told you, man,” 18 replies. “You gotta let that go.”
Here’s the thing. My memory’s not perfect, but unless it’s very bad, I don’t think the two of them had ever actually discussed this memory before.
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And it is true, I really may have missed a quick nod to the moment somewhere between space battles, philosophical rambling and an equal parts creepy and confusing dream sequence. But to be fair to this poor, overloaded reviewer, the fact that there’s too much here to hold onto is kind of the main problem.
At its heart, Mickey 17 is about a man who finds himself in dire financial straits and sells himself into servitude as an “expendable” on a space expedition. These workers are given what may be the most undesirable job in this near-future hellscape: dying.
Being an expendable’s not all that bad. When they die, their memories are all digitally preserved then re-uploaded into a cloned body, printed by a reconstitution machine that uses all manners of organic material (banana peels, human waste, dead bodies) to spit out a shiny new Mickey — like an abnormally reliable inkjet.
That makes them particularly valuable for dangerous experiments. Need to see how long it takes for radiation to kill a human in space? Send Mickey out there. Got a pesky alien virus problem? Infect Mickey and test the vaccines on him.
And there are plenty of dangerous experiments courtesy of Mark Ruffalo’s Kenneth Marshall, the leader of the expedition who is no doubt at least partially inspired by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — with a healthy dose of Jim Jones thrown in.
Marshall’s wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), whispers advice in his ear like a coiffed Wormtongue. She willfully tortures captured aliens, and from her, we get some insight into at least one of the movie’s meanings: “Sauce is the true litmus test for civilization.”
If you’re wondering what exactly she means by sauce, don’t worry, so is everyone else. Sometimes, it’s an approximation of food — perhaps alien tails blended together in some sort of space-age Magic Bullet — and other times it’s just blood drops wiped up from the floor.
Either way, it’s an interesting enough metaphor: the uber-rich of a space-exploring future so cartoonishly disconnected from the value of human life that they lust after the ground up goop of its constituent parts, be it in a sauce that’s consumed, or the kind used for printing out a bunch of Mickeys. It’s an enticing lens that’s interesting enough to craft an entire movie around.
Unfortunately, Mickey 17 also crafts itself around the Mickeys’ duelling sense of self. After 17 survives an assignment he wasn’t supposed to, 18 is accidentally cloned before the current Mickey actually dies. It’s a huge error, since both clones being alive at the same time constitutes a serious enough offence to warrant the Mickeys’ permanent execution. This is all based on a convoluted backstory involving a psychopathic serial killer, once again explained in Mickey 17‘s overused voiceover exposition dumps.
The two clones plot device was enough to basically fully fuel other sci-fi standards like Looper and Predestination. But it’s not enough for Mickey 17, which decides to throw a couple more clones in the fire.
Dropped plots
Some plots are picked up momentarily, then dropped unceremoniously until the very end. There’s the purposeful inclusion of a mysterious woman whose hair mysteriously reminds a pre-clone Mickey of his shame-ridden past.
Or a mysterious cough that plagues Marshall throughout most of the journey. And when Mickey first meets love interest Nasha (Naomi Ackie), they bond over being the only two spacefarers who refuse to clap for Marshall — that is, except for a scowling, mysterious bald woman standing behind Mickey who is specifically shown expressing her disapproval.
These mysterious circumstances are even more frequent in Mickey 17 than they are in those last two paragraphs. In fact, they’re so numerous they feel like they must be intentional — plot breadcrumbs specifically set up to be revisited later in some grand “a-ha!” moment where it all makes sense. But in practice, they are either dropped completely (Kenneth’s cough) or resolved so inconsequentially and so far in the background they seem like an accident or frantic afterthought.
Remember the mysterious, unnamed bald woman? If you squint in the background of the final scene, you’ll see she ends up dating a secondary antagonist from one of the other subplots abandoned about half an hour earlier.
Why? While it could be argued that this is a sign of overambitious writing and amateurish planning, and the overused voiceover exposition dumps suggest some ineptitude, that all seems unlikely here. The man that made the incredibly efficient Snowpiercer and both wrote and directed Parasite and Memories of a Murder isn’t someone who gets tripped up by narrative structure.
More likely it’s a sign of a nervous studio. Numerous delays, originally blamed on the writer’s strike, pushed the movie from March 2024, to January 2025 to its current date. The director admitted to Empire magazine the delay was at least partially due to debate over the film’s final cut in the editing room — his contract gave him final say over this decision, but he said it was one that involved “many opinions and many discussions.”
The many ambitious, half-finished elements scattered in the final cut, though, suggest too many compromises.
Some phenomenally gutsy acting choices by Pattison and sure-footed world building by Bong occasionally hints at brilliance, but there is simply too much attempted then abandoned to imagine Mickey 17 is the full story he originally intended to tell.
Instead, it feels like he had a titanic, hours-long epic in mind, but cut it in half to make concessions to less iron-stomached execs and papered over plot holes with voiceover to fit it all into a safer two hour cut.
But when you include twenty five per cent of four themes, you don’t get a whole movie — you get a mess. And if something like Francis Ford Coppola’s self-funded disaster Megalopolis proved that artists should sometimes listen to someone other than themselves, Mickey 17 might just prove the opposite.
