This article appeared in the March 21, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho, 2025)

It is not hard to imagine a terrible future. Ours is an age of cynical catastrophism. “How much worse could it get?” is a question no one bothers to ask; a quick scan of the disastrous present gives you, if not the exact coordinates of our destination, then the general direction in which we can expect to flop. Hope seeps from our bodies like ice cream from a baked Alaska. The dustbin of history awaits us all.

What is hard to imagine is a surprising and new version of a terrible future—one whose seeds are not contained in the degradations of today, and which, through the novelty of its insight into our mortal fecklessness, makes you sit up and realize, with a baroque thrill, that there could still be worse to come. This is a service performed by the best science fiction. Mickey 17—the latest film from establishment dissident Bong Joon Ho, set in a dystopian 2054—is, unfortunately, not an example.

We begin at a low point, both for Robert Pattinson’s titular Mickey Barnes—an “expendable” interplanetary serf on a private space-colonization mission, who is reprinted every time he dies—and for the film’s dialogue. Having tumbled into an icy crevasse on a remote planet, Mickey’s 17th iteration is surprised to find himself still alive. Pattinson’s off-kilter delivery provides a glimmer of strangeness against which every other element in the scene strains. He doesn’t panic: he bemoans not having snapped his spine on the way down and accepts quite readily the excuses of his confrere Timo (Steven Yeun), who leaves him to his fate after explaining—not once but thrice—the plot’s central device in clunking placeholder lines: “Plus they’re gonna reprint you.” “Have a nice death, see you tomorrow!” And “how does it feel to die?”

This last question becomes one of the movie’s motifs, a means of conjuring the banality of Mickey’s situation through the inanity of the small talk it inspires. Neither Mickey nor the film make much effort to answer the question. Death feels like dying; then you do it again. If this fundamental reorientation of human existence, from line to circle, has ramifications for individual psychology or social life, we don’t get to find out. Mickey’s character changes a bit between print-outs, but everyone around him, and Mickey himself, seems to see this as a side effect rather than proof of a new phenomenological mode of life. This isn’t a film in the philosophical register of Claire Denis’s 2018 High Life, Pattinson’s other intergalactic dérive, and an action blockbuster shouldn’t be judged on its Husserlian-ness (or lack thereof), but it should be fun to watch. And Mickey 17 isn’t. Boredom predominates, for the characters and the audience alike.

Stakes arrive in the form of a romance plot: early in his four-year journey to the planet Niflheim, Mickey falls quickly into a relationship with Naomi Ackie’s Nasha, a higher-ranking soldier on the ship. The love story disappears for the film’s middle third, until all the pieces are in place for something, finally, to happen. While Mickey 17 is in the ice cave, Mickey 18 is printed out on the assumption that his predecessor has perished; in fact, he has been saved by a troupe of sturdy giant wood lice, who, as with many of Bong’s monsters, prove to be more humane than the humans. Now there are two Mickeys, an ethical line-crossing punishable by the death of both and the prohibition of further reprints.

Mark Ruffalo turns in a supra-SNL performance as Kenneth Marshall, aka Trump in space, and there are a couple of nice touches of commentary woven into the setup, as when a wannabe cosmic colonist is disappointed to learn that he is not being interviewed on Marshall’s own channel but instead by regular cable news; distrust of legacy media has another 29 years of shelf life in Bong’s vision of the future. Toni Collette slithers about as a bronzed and bobbed First Lady, wringing every drop she can from a random subplot about sauces, and Yeun—one of contemporary Hollywood’s most unsettling actors, when allowed to be—is tragically underused. We realize we have reached the film’s climax because everyone is shouting.

Two effects—one aural, one visual—give the sense of watching something directed, not just adapted (from Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel, Mickey7). At key moments during the journey to Niflheim, the dialogue—which mostly serves to advance the plot—fades out, overlaid with extra-diegetic string and piano music and Pattinson’s narration, an effect which handily summons the feeling that little of what is occurring on screen really matters. Bong is on record as a fan of Hitchcock, from whom he’s borrowed the staircase as a metaphor for hierarchies of power in both Parasite (2019) and The Host (2006). Here, that diagonal composition recurs in shots featuring 17 and 18, with the latter often glowering above the former. Within the closed system of the mission, both are equally powerless—but Mickey 18 gains the upper hand purely by virtue of his domineering character.

Problems are resolved through due process and trials—throughout, there is an underlying conviction that some higher regulatory power will intervene if enough evidence of wrongdoing can be provided, despite the film containing multiple flashbacks to a congressional hearing that failed to put an end to the practice of human printing. (Another nice touch: the smug smile on the chairwoman’s face when she watches Marshall gurn stupidly; we understand what she fails to grasp: that this performance is his power, not his undoing.) After a climactic battle scene, the chief of the onboard military police announces that he has been filming the Marshalls’ abuses of power and that an investigation will soon commence.

As an ending, it’s resolution-by-cop: the remaining baddy is tidily shuffled offstage by the powers that be, despite the fact that the entire mission to Niflheim was predicated on escaping the grasp of just such powers. A coda reassures us that debate and democracy triumph on this new planet after all; spring arrives and we see bugs and humans engaged in cross-species scientific pursuits; Nasha is elected to lead a government and addresses her fellow colonists with self-congratulatory proclamations of the coming golden age, in the style of a U.N. address. If it fails as entertainment, Mickey 17 at least confirms our sense that the worst version of the future is one that feels just like the present.

Caitlín Doherty is a writer based in London.