Starring: Robert Pattinson, Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Ackie, Toni Collette.

Director: Bong Joon Ho
Year: 2025
Runtime: 2h 17m
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Mickey 17 is a quirky sci-fi comedy from acclaimed Korean director Bong Joon Ho.

It stars Robert Pattinson as the titular character alongside Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette.

This is Bong Joon Ho’s eighth movie to date. Other titles include Snowpiercer and Okja, alongside Parasite, winner of best picture at the 2020 Oscars.

Hits From The Bong

“Bong Joon Ho’s new movie is in cinema, it’s a science fiction movie about…”

“Sold!”

“Don’t you want to hear the premise first?”

“No, don’t need to”, said Mr. Brain.

Most of my life decisions are made this way.

So, having convinced myself, I mentioned it to one of my mates.

He didn’t ask follow-up questions either. Why bother?

It’s Bong Joon Ho. It’s sci-fi. And it’s about to be bumped by the fucking Minecraft movie!

It doesn’t require that much analysis to come to the right decision. 

Mickey 17 – By The Numbers

Word from across the pond was that Mickey 17 was an expensive bomb.

Though you wouldn’t have known from my screening.  

It’s worth pointing out that the only cinema still showing it was right near the local uni.

Turns out students dig Bong Joon Ho – who’d have guessed?

We arrived at a packed cinema forced to buy two shitty seats near the front offering minimal comfort and maximum neck strain.

With a lesser movie, my discomfort would have been more palpable.

As it was, I spent over two hours spellbound, munching greasy popcorn with my head up-tilted, not realising the extent of the damage until I woke up the following morning.

None of this is Bong Joon Ho’s fault, well, there’s nothing that would stand up in court anyway, so we’ll ignore the two subsequent days I spent admiring the ceiling and focus on the movie instead.

So, to the plot – and how nice that feels. Just to go see a movie with an actual plot!

At its core, Mickey 17 is a subversive parable about that ever-shrinking line between employment and corporate property.

Its main protagonist(s), the hapless Mickey Barnes, is on the run from violent gangsters for the most fatuous of reasons. Realising there are few places he can hide on Earth; he signs up for a deep space mission without bothering to read the fine print.

The mission is led by populist power couple Kenneth Marshall and his eccentric wife Ylfa, played by Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette.

Desperate to get on board and escape the gangsters, Mickey agrees to be an “expendable”, someone who’s hired to do dangerous jobs where death is a distinct possibility, but since they have backups, they can “print” out a new version each time he expires.

This is something we see occur multiple times throughout the journey, with the titular character being the 17th iteration of the ever-calamitous Mickey Barnes.  

Mickey retains memories up until the moment he expires, which is almost always due to the incompetence of others.   

The crew view Mickey as disposable and are apathetic to his suffering, all except for Nasha, the movie’s love interest.

Things grow more complicated once the mission reaches its destination and Mickey 17 gets lost on the planet’s surface.

Following a close encounter with the indigenous fauna, Mickey returns to the ship to discover a more cynical and mature iteration of himself is now bunked up with his soulmate Nasha. 

The rules of being an expendable are clear, one iteration can exist at one time and Mickey 17 risks termination if discovered. 

Luckily for him the crew has become distracted. The planet’s indigenous lifeforms appear hostile to the new would-be terraformers – but this is a Bong Joon Ho flick, so all is not what it seems.

The Good

Gallows Humour: Mickey 17 is my kind of humour, which likely explains why it performed badly in the US.

It’s dark but subtle, completely bereft of predictable beats and overt gags, opting instead to ambush you with unexpected bursts of lunacy.

Despite empathising with the titular character and feeling disgust at how he’s treated, it won’t stop you from laughing at the unrelenting absurdity.

One perfect example is the bio printer, which prints out new copies of Mickey once the previous iteration has snuffed it. But like any printer, it’s temperamental.

Pages spooling out onto the floor are an annoyance, but not half as messy as a human slapping skull-first onto the tiles.

World-building: Mickey 17’s premise isn’t particularly original, set in locations (a spaceship, an unexplored alien planet) we’ve seen a thousand times before.

What makes the movie stand out is its execution. Beyond the obvious things like costume and set design, which are both outstanding, is the industrial design.

Much like the work of Douglas Trumbull, the gunmetal grime of James Cameron’s Aliens, or the nuts-and-bolts aesthetic of The Expanse, Mickey 17’s future feels tactile and relatable.

So no matter how outlandish the story gets, it still feels somehow grounded and functional.

Performances: And trust me, Mickey 17 is a movie which starts out weird and grows increasingly outlandish with each scene.

In less capable hands the movie would go off trajectory, descending into yet another forgettable sci-fi farce, were it not for Robert Pattinson’s convincing dual performance.

His chemistry with Nasha anchors the movie, aided by a strong cast, all delivering credible performances with one glaring exception…

The Bad

Mark Trumpalo: My tastes range from subtle satire (Yes Minister) to not-so-subtle satire (Idiocracy, Wag the Dog, Robocop) but never beat-me-over-the head-with-the-metaphor satire (Don’t Look Up being a perfect example).

Ruffalo has proven range, from his nuanced performance in Zodiac, to the full-tilt moustache-twiddling of Poor Things. But his portrayal of wealthy sociopath Kenneth Marshall is his most over the top performance to date.

Which is saying something, given that he’s best known for playing the Incredible Hulk.

I mean sure, he makes a choice and just goes for it. But instead of satirising populists, his cheap SNL Trump impression kept taking me out of the movie.

The Perennial Third Act Problem: Yet another example of a movie where I loved the setup more than the conclusion. It’s an issue with so many movies these days, with sci-fi suffering the worst.

Yes, it’s an original ending and the effects look great, but it does drag on.

Those damn seats didn’t help, right at the front, neck craned upward, and ass numb for the majority of the runtime.

I was too enthralled in the story to notice, until the climax of the movie, that’s when I started getting uncomfortable.

The Kinky:

Kinky 17: As the movie progresses Nasha faces a dilemma. Instead of one lover she suddenly has two different Mickeys, each competing for her affection. So, what’s a girl to do? Try to deal with it with tact and delicacy?

Nah, fuck that. Let’s have a threesome.

I mean, yeah, who wouldn’t? Well, Hollywood wouldn’t, but Bong goes there. 

Standout Scene

The highlight for me was the Mickey death montage – watching this accursed character die over and over again for ridiculous reasons is comically tragic.

Especially those printer malfunctions.

We Love Them Hos

Mickey 17 is a well-crafted piece of original sci-fi with an absurd yet relatable premise.

Well, when I say original, I don’t mean entirely original, but rather virgin IP with a fresh artistic vision, which, itself, is something of a miracle in 2025.

This is by no means Bong Joon Ho’s best movie, but it plays to his strengths, providing an inventive take on genre filmmaking, playing with our expectations while highlighting the absurdity of the human condition through parody and dark comedy.

Shaving around 15-20 minutes off the ending would have resulted in a much tighter movie though.

I also think if Ruffalo had dialled back the cartoon Trump impression a couple of notches and replaced it with the nuance I know he’s capable of, this could well have been a bone-fide cinematic classic.

As my mate pointed out though, we should just enjoy the fact that they’re finally making these kinds of inventive and over-the-top movies again. 

We were lucky to have seen it in cinema, not because of the spectacle but because of how much fun it was in a communal setting.

Unlike most Hollywood fare, the audience wasn’t laughing in unison at the same prefabricated gags.

Instead, there were sporadic snickers throughout, emanating from various corners of the room eliciting a sense of camaraderie with other audience members tickled by the same absurd moment.

If you have a chance to see it in the cinema, go now, it delivers (mostly) credible sci-fi spectacle with plenty of laughs. And I guarantee you won’t see anything else quite like it this year.

Similar Viewing

The Obvious Answer: the obvious capitalist-asshole-humans-colonise-a-planet-and-wreck-the -place movie is James Cameron’s original Avatar, released way back in 2009.

It doesn’t hold up quite like you remember, but is worth revisiting, especially since we’ve got a new Avatar movie coming out this year and chances are you’ve already forgotten all the characters.

The Not-So-Obvious Answer: also from 2009, the lesser-known Moon stars Sam Rockwell in a similarly themed clones-in-space movie.

While Mickey 17 plays the premise for laughs, Moon offers a much darker take on alienation, identity and corporate ownership.

It’s a solid yet tragically underrated slice of dystopian sci-fi, made even more unsettling thanks to an eerily evocative score from Clint Mansell. (As if listening to an AI voiced by Kevin Spacey wasn’t creepy enough already.)