Mickey 17: Robert Pattinson is terrific but sci-fi satire goes off course

Robert Pattinson goes forth and multiplies as clones in outer space in Bong Joon Ho's bizarre sci-fi satire Mickey 17. The South Korean director's first film since the brilliant, Oscar-winning Parasite is messy, scattershot and overlong, but Pattinson, making yet another of his daring, post-Twilight role choices, almost holds it all together.

He plays Mickey Barnes, a terminally ill-fated loser in a dystopian near future who signs up, along with his cannier, self-seeking friend Timo (Steven Yeun), for a dodgy space colonization expedition in a bid to escape a murderous loan shark down on Earth. Timo lands himself a cushy post as a pilot on the expedition's giant spaceship, which is bound for an icy planet called Niflheim. Unfortunately, Mickey neglects to read the small print of his contract and his job turns out to be that of an "Expendable", a disposable worker put into fatally perilous jobs. In the story's bizarre future, however, scientists have come up with a form of reincarnation in which the dead can be brought back to life as a clone, memories intact, courtesy of a giant bio-printer.

When the film opens, Mickey has already been through sixteen reprints (we later get a darkly comic sequence showing his previous demises), and when he falls into an icy crevasse on Niflheim it looks as though Mickey 17 will soon be going the same way. "Nice knowing you," says the callous Timo, who happens to be on hand. "Have a nice death. See you tomorrow." But Mickey somehow survives both his fall into the crevasse and his encounter with the planet’s Indigenous species, weird creatures that look like a cross between a furry insect and an armadillo and which come to be dubbed as "Creepers". When Mickey 17 makes his way back to the ship, he discovers that Mickey 18 has already been printed. But multiples are strictly outlawed, and if either Mickey is to survive, the other must perish…

Pattinson is terrific in these dual roles, making Mickey 17 a naive passive doofus with a bowl cut borrowed from the Three Stooges’ Moe, while Mickey 18 is sharper and much more aggressive and rebellious. Sadly, the film's other performances are for the most part less successful. Mark Ruffalo plays the space mission's leader, a failed politician named Kenneth Marshall, a strutting, narcissistic, Trump-like buffoon, with a gumshield smile, perma-tan and Benito Mussolini's jutting chin. Backed by a zealous church company, this would-be colonist has fascistic dreams of creating a "pure white planet". His sheep-like followers sport red, Maga-like caps. Of course, they do. The satire is blatantly on the nose, and even more urgent now than when the film was made, but it is never particularly funny.

Mickey 17 | Official Trailer 2 - YouTube

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Toni Collette goes similarly over the top as Marshall's appalling, sauce-obsessed wife, Ylfa, but Naomi Ackie proves much more down to earth and real as Mickey's girlfriend, resilient security agent Nasha, although her character is in places more plot-led than convincing. For a while, it seems that Nasha will have a love rival in the form of Anamaria Vartolomei's higher-status coworker Kai, but this particular story strand is, like many of the film's ideas, left dangling. Indeed, the longer the film goes on, the more Bong’s screenplay (based on the 2022 novel "Mickey 7" by Edward Ashton) seems to go off course.

As fans of the director's work will know, this isn't the first time he has delivered swingeing anti-capitalist satire on screen. Parasite (2019) was especially fierce in its critique of the gulf between society's haves and have-nots, but that film showed Bong handling his story's tonal shifts between satire, screwball farce, black comedy and horror much more deftly than he manages here. His previous English-language films, Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017), also took ferocious swipes at greed and exploitation, and both boasted grotesquely caricatured baddies, with Tilda Swinton displaying buck-teeth and bottle-end glasses as a monstrous authoritarian in Snowpiercer, while Jake Gyllenhaal was exaggeratedly OTT as a squeaky-voiced TV celebrity vet in Okja. With an endlessly expendable worker as its protagonist, Mickey 17 could be a really pointed allegory about human exploitation, but the film Bong has ended up making is bluntly obvious and unfocused. Still, Pattinson is wonderfully funny and surprisingly touching. Despite playing multiple clones, he gives the film humanity and heart.

Mickey 17 premieres in movie theaters on Friday, March 7.