Watching Snowpiercer on Ketamine, or: How I Learned to […] Love Mickey 17

“You’re not dead yet?”

Bong Joon Ho’s latest film opens on a close-up of the eponymous Mickey, played by Robert Pattinson, in a crevasse. His closest “friend”—big air quotes around that one—Timo, a small-time hustler and perpetual debtor played by a wonderfully smarmy Steven Yeun, peers over him. He’s the one who got Mickey in this problem in the first place. A failed macaron enterprise condemned them to serve on the colonizing space voyage to the inhospitable frozen planet of Nilfheim in a desperate attempt to outrun a loan shark. Lucky for Timo, he’s a pilot. Unlucky for Mickey, he has no skills, no resume, no ambitions. He signs up as an “expendable.” The woman at the spaceport asks him if he’s sure. 

The entirety of Mickey’s personality and memories now reside inside a data core housed in archaic red brick, its brutal edges complicated by the big handle and blinking lights that flank every side of the contraption. His life now consists of dying over and over again in service of the mission; being chewed up by either the planet or the various experiments conducted to colonize it and spit out by a big printer resembling an MRI machine. 

In adapting the novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, director Bong Joon Ho makes the great decision to add 10 more lifetimes and change Mickey’s background from middle- to working-class, all in service of the often funny and always scathing critiques of modern capital that define his work. The film thankfully also shows restraint in not having too many Mickeys meet their death one after the other, over and over again in a Groundhog Day at the Edge of Tomorrow. Instead, Mickey 17 poses the question: what if one slipped through the cracks? 

Because, as Director Bong portrays him, Mickey has been slipping through the cracks all his life. 

Robert Pattinson taps into this for his performance as the 17th Mickey: he pitches his voice up an octave, underlining the fact that you are seeing a pathetic and neurotic copy of a copy of a copy. In what may be the film’s weakest move, his voiceover leads us through a good chunk of the movie. That may make it or break it for you. Apparently his first inspiration for the voice was Steve-O, but Bong Joon Ho told him to tone it down because it was too annoying. He settled on Stimpy from Ren and Stimpy. (To be taken with a grain of salt: Pattinson is a pathological liar in interviews.)

So, does that make Timo his Ren? Maybe initially, but when he leaves Mickey for dead only to have him crawl back to base after his replacement has already been printed, Mickey 17 finds his own worst frenemy in his better self: Mickey 18. This version seems to have none of the fear and anxiety of his previous iteration, who is haunted with guilt after being involved in a freak car accident that killed his mother.

Mickey 18 also shows an open contempt for the colonizing voyage’s Captain Kenneth Marshall, an also-failure of a politician turned some weird combination of televangelist and jarhead. Played by Mark Ruffalo in maybe the second-weakest aspect of the film, Marshall hosts his own talk show on the ship and, beyond exerting his power, is mostly all over his wife Ylfa. (Toni Collette—can you blame him?) Sometimes Ruffalo’s performance worked, sometimes it harkened too much to Walton Goggins in The Righteous Gemstones. Might’ve had to do with the big fake teeth Ruffalo wears. 

As smarter critics than I have noted, nothing in Bong Joon Ho’s oeuvre points to subtlety. The concept of “failing upwards” originally seems like it will just serve as a strong, unspoken through line until Kenneth Marshall declares he and his colony are doing so “to perfection.” Even Nilfheim is his dream of a “pure white planet of superior people.” For his wife, it’s a new culinary frontier. One of the funniest aspects of the movie is her fetishistic obsession with sauce, harvested from the tardigrade-like creatures that inhabit the frozen planet. 

“Sauce is the true litmus test of civilization.”

Speaking of food, I was receiving my order of chocolate chip cookies at this advance screening while the presenters hailed Director Bong as “our anti-capitalist king” in an effort to encourage tipping the servers and thanked the PR company putting the event on in the same breath. This struck me as the funny kind of cognitive dissonance required of all of us in 2025. According to a server, they hardly see any of the 18% “service charge” now added to everyone’s checks. Corporate greed disguised as inflation disguised as progress.

Director Bong himself is very deft at using a similar cognitive dissonance to not only prod and stretch these critiques of our current socio economic climate, but also to move between disparate tones and genres. Mickey 17 is maybe one of Director Bong’s funniest films to date, but he’s not afraid of tapping into the cinematic language of romance, horror or action movies when the scene calls for it. 

In Mickey 17, the film’s editing skips around space and time for ironic effect. The ship’s crew being instructed to preserve rations and refrain from sex intercut with a scene of Mickey and his doting, higher-status girlfriend Nasha (Naomie Ackie) doing the exact opposite. She is over the moon that there are now two Mickeys. Poor guy can’t catch a break.

But Mickey’s situation turns out to be highly illegal. The movie spends a fair bit of exposition on the fact that one of the principal members behind the human printing project used the device to make a clone of himself and commit several murders. This explainer on the legal ramifications of “multiples” doesn’t completely stop the film in its tracks but does contribute to the general bloat. There’s more than one instance where characters are talking under the voiceover, but it seems like the dialogue was conceptualized and recorded well before its inclusion. 

Dying and being reborn over and over again does convey a certain Messianic quality to your protagonist, which the slogan from the poster taps into, and which culminates in Nasha holding Mickey in a literal pietà in a flashback as one of his former iterations is killed by an experiment now being used to violently colonize the planet, that only his current selves are capable of stopping. It is perhaps this aspect that results in an ending that is less bleak than his 2019 hit Parasite, if a bit reformist. 

I was lucky enough to sneak into a faculty-only screening of Parasite at UT as an undergrad, also before its release. The room was packed and the excitement was palpable. Everyone walked away knowing they’d seen a master of his craft at the top of his game, and the crossover success that followed culminating in the film’s Best Picture win at the Oscars confirmed as such. 

Mickey 17 is not such a film. What could be? It’s hard to blame the guy for taking a five-year break. Society collectively went through the looking glass in between then. This film is Director Bong trying to get his bearings in this brave new world by tapping into the strongest inclinations of his English-speaking work. It’s the best of these by far, but limited by its scope and ultimately the studio machine. He’s probably hoping it doesn’t kill him off and reprint him. 

Poor Mickey. Perpetually grieving himself. Never letting himself go for pushing one button on his mom’s car and causing her deadly crash. 

As he says while dying, yet again: “I get it. It’s all punishment.”

It is his better self that tells him, late in the movie, that it was a defect on the part of the car, not himself, that made his mother go away. He’s carried this survivor’s guilt with him through every lifetime until that point. But when the whole system is made to grind you beneath its heel, why make yourself suffer more? 

“It’s okay for me to be happy.”

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