[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]
Mickey 17 is the most compellingly horrifying dystopian sci-fi satire that I’ve encountered in quite some time. In director Bong Joon-ho’s nightmarish vision of a doomed future, Earth has become so inhospitable that humanity flees to the stars en masse, “volunteering” to colonize distant planets in the hopes of escaping poverty, pollution, and oppression. Life, however, is equally harsh and unforgiving in outer space: synthetic food is strictly rationed in order to maximize the “productive” expenditure of calories; narcissistic, megalomaniacal dictators (like Mark Ruffalo’s cartoonishly repulsive Kenneth Marshall) rule the voyagers under their command with an iron fist, treating their crew as little more than a captive audience for their egocentric political propaganda; and labor is ruthlessly exploited, with workers reduced to disposable cogs in a vast industrial machine that, more often than not, serves no discernible purpose—indeed, the titular protagonist (played across multiple iterations by a deliciously hammy Robert Pattinson) is officially designated as an “Expendable”: whenever he dies on the job, his employers simply print an artificial clone of him (constructed from “recycled organic materials”) and immediately shove him straight back into the meat grinder to repeat the process ad infinitum.
The setting is so pervasively cruel, indifferent, and corrupt, in fact, that its moral decay taints even the film’s most sympathetic characters. Naomi Ackie’s Nasha Barridge, for example, is delightfully complex. She frequently abuses her authority as a security officer (in one early scene, she draws her service pistol on a fellow passenger for the crime of… bullying her boyfriend—dickish behavior, to be sure, but certainly not an offense worthy of summary execution), occasionally indulges in recreational drug use as a means of self-medication (which probably explains her emotional instability—an irresponsible habit for a woman who carries a firearm, as the plot eventually bears out), and enthusiastically embraces the kinky potential of the simultaneous existence of two copies of her lover (dubbed Mickeys 17 and 18 for the sake convenience) without any regard for his feelings on the matter. But she is also a fundamentally decent person: she sincerely adores Mickey, comforting him through his innumerable demises/resurrections and looking out for his wellbeing at her own expense. Ultimately, she’s a hero, despite her superficial flaws; it’s just that nobody can remain completely untarnished in such an inherently toxic environment.
Mickey 17 has a lot to say—about the perversion of institutions of power, about the inherent injustice of corporate greed, about the absurdity of religious zealotry, and about the nature of human consciousness (is each successive reincarnation of Mickey an exact duplicate of his predecessors, or are they all unique individuals, with distinct personalities, ambitions, and “souls?”)—and articulates its central themes with an appropriate degree of clarity (i.e., the total absence of subtlety). What a fascinating (albeit utterly grotesque) universe to briefly visit!
And how discouraging that it already so closely resembles the reality that we currently inhabit…
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