Review: Mickey-17 (Patreon)

Some spoilers ahead.

In Mickey7 author Edward Ashton's first interview about Mickey-17 with the Anglophone press, Ashton told my colleagues Dan Schrack and Stephannie Joseph that Bong Joon Ho opted to increase the number of Mickeys because he felt the book was "insufficiently murderous." Hard to think of a better choice this movie makes than increasing the number of Mickeys.

The premise itself is hilariously brutal: Robert Pattinson gets killed again and again doing shitty jobs to escape extraordinarily stupid debt. Mickey learning that even literal death won't free him from his debts is almost gorgeously bleak. And Bong Joon Ho creating the cutest space critters in recent memory only to have them tortured and shot to pieces is one of the most majestically fucked up things anyone has ever done.

If only the political content amounted to more than "huh, the rich sure are assholes, aren't they?" Not a single interesting question about consciousness gets raised in connection to the premise. Evangelical language about queer people is utilized to address the issue of Multiples — and then it's immediately dropped (and the only major queer character falls in line with the law on Multiples, something that could certainly be explored more). And the second half of the story, a muddled treatise on colonialism, feels like an entirely separate movie from the first half. Often fun, gloriously upsetting, but undercooked Big Ideas sci-fi.