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James Mottram

4/5 stars
Korean master Bong Joon-ho is back with his first film since 2019’s Cannes- and Oscar-winning Parasite.
Six years is a long time, but the director has not lost any of his storytelling sensibilities when it comes to unpacking Edward Ashton’s cult novel Mickey7.
A science fiction parable, one that fits neatly alongside Bong’s earlier works Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017), Mickey 17 is a darkly funny look at humankind’s desire to conquer at any cost.


Set in 2054, the film stars Robert Pattinson as Mickey Barnes, a loser whose confectionery business went belly up, leaving him in debt to a gangster.
And so he disappears from Earth, signing up to be an “expendable”. There to help protect those on a space mission to a faraway planet, he is nothing more now than a disposable corpse.
When a virus strikes, he is the living Petri dish, there to develop the vaccine; every time he dies, the tech staff simply clone him. By the time the story starts, he’s the seventeenth Mickey.
Dealing with the ethics of cloning, and man’s meddling in biology, Mickey 17 is an increasingly strange experience. The story hinges on the fact that Mickey 17 survives certain death, and suddenly is faced with a double – No. 18 – who has been “reprinted” in his absence.
Suddenly, there are two Robert Pattinsons running around;; the two Mickeys have a threesome with Mickey’s lover Nasha, played by Naomi Ackie.

Partly set in space, partly on an icy planet populated by tentacled creatures that look “like a croissant dipped in s**t” as another character, Ylfa Marshall (Toni Collette), remarks, the film aims for broad black comedy. This is encapsulated by Ylfa’s husband, Kennedy (Mark Ruffalo), an exploitative Congressman who claims that “multiples” of any one person “are Satan’s work”.
Ruffalo overeggs his performance in much the way he did in Poor Things. It just about stays the right side of bonkers.
True, the film doesn’t quite have the legs to sustain its 137-minute running time, but it’s heartening to see Bong play in the Hollywood sandpit again, and using a bigger budget to realise one of his more outlandish visions.

With an on-song Pattinson ideal as his agent of chaos, notably in one crazy dinner party scene with Ruffalo and Collette, this is one of the wilder, weirder films to hit cinemas this spring. And for that, it should be celebrated.
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Robert Pattinson plays the titular Mickey, a loser sent into space, where he is cloned with hilarious results in this cult-novel adaptation


Robert Pattinson plays the titular Mickey, a loser sent into space, where he is cloned with hilarious results in this cult-novel adaptation.


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Review

Review | Berlin 2025: Mickey 17 movie review – Parasite’s Bong Joon-ho back with wild sci-fi satire

Robert Pattinson plays the titular Mickey, a loser sent into space, where he is cloned with hilarious results in this cult-novel adaptation