One of the minor but annoying problems with our current nightmare timeline is that it’s made most dystopian fiction puerile. What with the fascist oligarchy, the planetary collapse, and 1000-year rule by venal ignorant chucklefuck, it’s difficult to craft future scenarios that look like anything but a relief.
Mickey 17 is a good example of the dilemma. Director Bong Joon Ho is known for his blackly comic depictions of capitalist nightmares, and his new film’s high concept seems like a promising entry in that genre. The movie’s set in a future where earth has been ravaged by environmental collapse, and people are desperately trying to emigrate off-world.
One of those hopeful space-farers is Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), a failed small businessman on the run from loan sharks. With no real skills, he signs up for a trip to new human colony Niflheim as an Expendable. Being an Expendable means his body is cloned and his mind is backed up; then he’s sent to perform the most dangerous missions. When he inevitably dies, he’s brought back to life—or “printed out”—so he can get killed again.
Bong does an excellent job of taking this bleak premise and exploring its most painful implications. Mickey’s at the bottom of the pecking order on the ship, which means everyone treats him as disposable and contemptible.
The expedition’s leader, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, with a very funny Trump impersonation), screams at him for not dying in the right way at the right time and deliberately poisons him; the scientists perform ghoulish and unnecessary experiments on him. But even his supposed co-workers feel empowered to bully him, sneer at him, and leave him to die when rescuing him would require minimal risk or effort. The bored techs can’t even be bothered to wheel up a cart so that he has someplace to lie when he comes out of the printer. Often he’s left to flop helplessly from the machine to the floor.
This contempt for Mickey extends to Mickey himself; Pattinson plays him as a shy, semi-inarticulate introvert, so gormless he can’t even mount an effective protest when his best friend proposes cutting him up with a chain saw. That all changes when Mickey 17 unexpectedly doesn’t die after falling into a crevice on Niflheim. He returns to the ship to discover that his next iteration has already been printed. There are now two identical versions of him— identical that is, except that Mickey 18 is much less willing to take anyone’s shit.
This is where the movie turns away from dystopia. With his 18th resurrection, Mickey attains a class consciousness; he’s suddenly able to recognize that Kenneth Marshall—a religious wacko obsessed with purity—is a fraud and thug, and that the system which exploits Expendables is wrong. That insight ripples through the rest of the colony and the movie. Security agent Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who’s Mickey’s lover, also becomes radicalized. The indigenous inhabitants of the planet—creatures which look like giant dust mites—reveal themselves as possible allies. Resistance isn’t futile. Change is possible. A new world can be a different world.
I’m not opposed to hope or to hopeful stories. Given our current situation—in which a majority of citizens voted to make us poorer, meaner and less free—it’s hard to credit the speed and ease with which the forces of equality and freedom triumph.
Bong finished the film before our new era. But he sensed that his ending was too glib. He tries to solve that by introducing pointless dream sequences and ironic twists, padding the run time. But even at 137 minutes, Mickey 17 doesn’t feel as long as the last decade. And no matter how much the Expendable is tortured, what we’ve done to ourselves, our neighbors, and our world, is worse.