Mickey 17 Parent Guide

Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) was blessed with neither a sharp mind nor a good selection of friends. Recently, his acquaintance with Timo (Steven Yeun) landed him in debt to a loan shark with a tendency to chainsaw recalcitrant debtors. Rather than face that cheery prospect, Mickey signs on to an interplanetary colony ship as an “expendable”. Basically, if there’s a dirty, dangerous, and probably fatal job, it’s going to be Mickey’s. If it kills him, that’s no problem:

the technology exists to essentially “print” a brand-new Mickey, and regular memory backups mean that the new “expendables” are basically the same as the old ones.

A problem arises when Mickey 17 survives a mission which was presumed to be fatal, and the administrators print up a brand shiny new Mickey – Mickey 18. Multiple copies of the same person are strictly prohibited, and if discovered, they’ll both be killed and the memory backup destroyed – real death, this time. Sharing the food and work should be easy enough; Mickey’s girlfriend, Nasha (Naomi Ackie), less so, especially since she’s one of the colony’s security officers.

Combining sci-fi, dark comedy, political commentary, rom-com, and slapstick is a little like making swamp water at a soda fountain – just a bit of everything on some ice. Director Bong Joon-ho has managed the mixture a little more delicately, and it is kind of interesting to watch the movie slide from one genre layer to another, but it still sticks here and there. That issue is compounded by the runtime, which I think is a quarter of an hour too long, and the movie gets lost on tangents here and there.

Problems aside, there’s plenty of fun to be had with the film. Pattinson makes some really big physical performance choices that help distinguish his otherwise identical characters from one another, Ackie is sharp and funny, and Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette seem to be having too much fun to get paid for this. The premise is compelling, the social commentary is biting, and the visual design is gorgeous. Classic Bong Joon-ho, in other words.

Parents will be less interested in the finer points of filmmaking and more concerned with the near-constant splatter of extreme profanity, sexual content, and brutal gory violence. Mickey really gets put through the wringer – and the incinerator, the test chamber, the radiation of deep space – pretty much anything fatal, and usually comes out a little pulpy. For family audiences, that’s usually a deal breaker. For the adult dark sci-fi fans, less so.

About author

Keith Hawkes

Keith Hawkes graduated from Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada with a degree in English and History. His interests are movies, American literature, science fiction, almost every kind of music, and museums. He enjoys criticizing films for fun - although he's okay with being paid for it.