Mickey 17: The Art of Literalism

I have seen three Bong Joon-ho films (Snowpiercer, Parasite, and Mickey 17). In each case, the man’s work reflects a deep investment in allegory. What I mean is a marked literalness. The world is ending due to climate change; everyone is on a train, and the train’s layout reflects a broader truth about contemporary class society. It relies on abject working conditions, child labor, and inflexible hierarchies to sustain our current world.

In the train too, we see little hands handling whirring gears, fancy rich folks enjoying themselves while the world freezes to death. Fear and ignorance grip the poor now; a poverty of understanding keeps the passengers at the back of the train from standing up for themselves and discovering the inner workings of their chugging world. Parasite (2019) dares to invert the Randian inversion of Marx: who is the real parasite here? The households don’t just reflect our moment—they are how we organize ourselves according to wealth and concomitant social status now.

I am ambivalent about this mode of filmmaking. Bong knows what he’s doing; he makes entertaining movies that go down easily. They spark joy.  As a medievalist by training, I love nothing more than a superficially shallow stand-in for some unthinkably complicated cross-section of social reality. But the form feels too literal sometimes, too hemmed in by its own modest ambitions, a victim of its own success.

Mickey 17 (2024), adapted from a novel by Edward Ashton, left me feeling that same confusion. I found myself entertained but baffled. The craft impressed me, as did the performances. But an abyss yawned inside of me. Why?

Like any black comedy, Mickey 17 requires a serious premise. Mickey (Robert Pattinson) is an man from earth. He is driven by poverty to become an “expendable” on a colonial voyage to the snow-covered planet Niflheim. “Expendables” are unfortunate souls who agree to re-cloning every time they die. Mickey 17’s name is thus a reflection of how many iterations it’s taken to get to this point in the voyage. He dies all manner of ways—vaccination research, exposure to harmful gas, placement in space with part of his spacesuit missing (his hand explodes).

Leading the voyage, disgraced politician and Musk-Trump hybrid Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), seek a barren new world they can fill with their superior genetics and natural fecundity. These two eat steaks and other earth fare, while the colonists subsist on gray goop (carefully monitored by weight at each meal). Mickey and his girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackle) face off against what is obviously an unjust regime bent on the destruction of a local, friendly insectoid species called Creepers.

The tone, however, is comedic, with only a few detours through the storied realm of melodrama, largely at the end. Mickey flees earth because his idiot friend convinces him to invest in a macaroon business. The venture fails and the mafia, from whom they received a loan, means business. Mickey’s deaths produce laughter from his comrades—they know he’s coming back after all. His favorite activity is sex with Nasha. This is so much so that they pass the time designing increasingly intricate sex moves, putting together the kind of palimpsest best appreciated by teen boys surfing Urban Dictionary.

The moral horizon of Bong’s film encompasses more than the comedy might let on. Its commitment to the quandaries created by cloning ranks with some of the best science fiction around. Can a person voluntarily sign up to be an expendable? To what degree can we countenance cloning when it could so easily lead to an infinite series of murders in the name of science and progress? If a clone is reprinted before the prior one dies, which is the “real” one? How different would they be? If one has sex with someone else, is that cheating on their “mutual” partner? Should their partner even be mutual? What kind of torture would it be to have everyone ask you what it’s like to die, only to have no answer because your memories don’t include death itself?

Many of these questions invoke real-world analogues, some quite simply.

That these issues coexist with a broadly comedic tone is an accomplishment. At the same time, I fear the movie can’t square the circle. It insists on a one-to-one identification between its satirical targets and their real-world antecedents (watch Ruffalo perform and tell me he is anything but Trump with a few Muskian flares). In some cases, it smartly avoids simple tropes (like the scheming wife controlling the bumbling tyrant). At other times, it refuses to take its own moral seriousness, well, seriously. Despite many opportunities, almost no one dies. By the final third, it transforms into a subpar contender in the annual Hollywood Melodrama Tournament. It expects us to care for these characters, to weep for their foibles and imminent doom. And yet, the entire film has been nothing but laughs, always pausing just before things become a little too tense, too serious.

And that is, I suspect, a product of its straightforwardness, its literalism. From almost its opening, the film invites us to take cloning seriously, to consider why and how it raises ethical questions about that topic and other contemporary social issues. In this sense, Mickey 17 matches the commentary of a film like Snowpiercer (2013).

At the same time, it swerves toward comedy, releases all that tension, pulls us away from considering the laughably allegorical cypher that is Kenneth Marshall to be any real moral problem, anything to worry about. But in the end, it requests that we take its characters and message seriously. Bong seems to ask us to hope for the victory of good over evil, to fear the triumph of the evil he’s so clearly skewering. But why should I? Mickey is a joke, as is the mission. It’s all chuckles. The satire falls flat of ever producing catharsis, evacuates any kind of social responsibility or earnest anger.

Mickey 17 invites comparison with Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997). Both movies adapt novels. Both feature insect-like alien creatures that are not as threatening as they seem. They suggest that future humanity unites itself in its inhumanity, in a species of fascism. But there the comparison ends. Verhoeven’s film plays the entire narrative straight. How else has a generation of military zealots bamboozled itself into thinking the movie positively reflects their values? The satire remains implicit because it builds on familiar Hollywood forms; the critique, which is to say its moral universe, is rendered invisible except to those in on the joke.

By contrast, Bong’s movie puts its moral concerns front and center only to pretend they don’t matter. The film lapses directly into stayed tropes in a final act that could be from any sci-fi, action blockbuster of the last 30 years. His literalistic satire is undone by a refusal to meet its own moral demands. It left me in my seat, having mostly enjoyed the film, bewildered by what the point of it all could be.