Who’s the real Mickey? Does it matter?

Longtime readers of this column may know that I have a soft spot for both actor Robert Pattinson (vampire hero and Batman of our age) and director Bong Joon Ho (whose 2019 movie Parasite is one of my all-time favorites). It would be cliché to say that I would follow their work to the ends of the universe, but that is what the two of them offer in Mickey 17, and I was gratefully along for the ride.

The movie opens with our titular character Mickey (Pattinson) navigating blizzard conditions on the far-off planet Niflheim. He crashes through the ground into a majestic icy cave, where he waits patiently to die. Dying, it turns out, is Mickey’s job. He is an “expendable,” sent to Niflheim as part of an expedition hoping to colonize the planet. Part menial laborer, part lab rat, Mickey does all the jobs that are too dangerous for ordinary humans. Need someone to rewire the spaceship’s external ports in extreme conditions? Or a living body to test the foreign toxins of a new atmosphere? Or someone who can track down the indigenous inhabitants of the new planet regardless of the threat they pose? Mickey’s your man. When he dies, which he inevitably does, a new body is printed out again using the recycled organic waste on the ship. His memories are regularly uploaded to a hard drive, so that each time he is reprinted he is restored to his previous consciousness.

The satire is pointed, dark, and played for laughs. In a rapid-fire sequence, Mickey sits naked in an isolated plastic tube, reminiscent of a human-sized hamster cage, vomiting blood as his body fights the toxic infection in the new planet’s atmosphere. His body is wrapped in yellow hazmat material and shunted into a furnace. He is right back in the hamster cage. Rinse. Repeat.