‘Mickey 17’ movie review: Robert Pattinson is sweet, sour, seventeen and everything in between

‘Mickey 17’ movie review: Swinging wildly from sharp, social satire to broad comedy, from dystopian nightmare to glorious creature feature, Bong Joon-ho’s post-’Parasite’ offering is riotously entertaining

It is well-nigh impossible to celebrate just one aspect of Bong Joon-ho’s adaptation of Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel, Mickey7 — Joon-ho apparently called the film Mickey 17 for the pleasure of killing Robert Pattinson 10 more times. Every aspect of Mickey 17, from the writing (Joon-ho wrote the screenplay from an early draft of the novel) to the acting as well as cinematographer Darius Khondji’s lovely frames (that severed, floating hand is singed on the brain) and those delightful creepy crawlies with their wriggling legs and many mouths, is laudable.

In the near future, 2054 to be precise, Mickey (Robert Pattinson) and his slimy, childhood friend, Timo (Steven Yeun), run afoul of a particularly vicious loan shark. Their only escape seems to be off earth. Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) is a tyrannical politician who has lost the last two elections. Marshall, with his equally sketchy wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), have set course to colonise Nilfheim, a planet of ice and snow.

In the future, technology has advanced to 3D printing human beings, but thanks to all the ethical issues (brought to life in the case of the psychopathic scientist), it is banned on earth. Human beings are only printed as “expendables” to do dangerous work off earth.

Marshall’s Nilfheim-colonising project offers a chance of escape for Mickey and Timo, who naturally gets himself a pilot gig. Mickey, meanwhile, signs up to be an expendable, without fully reading the paperwork, which he realises to his mild horror as Gemma (Holliday Grainger) explains his part in the larger scheme of things.

Mickey meets and falls in love with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who stays by him through his 16 deaths as the science officer, Arkady (Cameron Britton), develops vaccines and sundry defenses for life at Nilfheim. Everything changes when Mickey 17 is ordered to get a specimen of the life form on Nilfheim, the many-legged and mouthed creeper that is not allowing full colonisation.

When he falls through an ice crevice and is overrun by a multitude of creepers, he is presumed dead and Mickey 18 is printed. Mickey 17, however, survives and is shocked to find his aggressive double. The penalty for duplicates is immediate death to every version and suddenly Mickey is fighting himself as well as others who want him dead or doubled.

Pattinson is a revelation as different iterations of Mickey, clearly differentiating between the simple Mickey 17 and his belligerent double. Ruffalo, with his lisp and too-white teeth, is riveting as media-hungry Marshall, while Collette with her scary nails and penchant for sauce is mesmeric.