Review: Mickey 17

Things are a bit shit these days. The cost of living has skyrocketed, the planet is quickly dying, and Teslas are a protected species. It seems that the powers at be are either complicit, or so woefully ignorant that they have no idea it’s happening, and sometimes it’s hard to know which. It’s hard to imagine anything but a bleak future. Mickey 17, directed by Bong Joon Ho, is exactly that bleak future. In an attempt to stave off a crippling debt, Mickey signs himself up to a colony ship as an expendable. Whenever he dies, he gets printed out again to keep going.

In true terrible human fashion, scientists under the command of Kenneth Marshall, a failed politician with clear illusions of grandeur, subject Mickey to tests and generally treat him exactly like an expendable. The satire in Mickey 17 is on point. Mickey is the representation of the common man, trying to do anything he can to get by in a world that is perfectly willing to chew him up and spit him out. All while politicians like Marshall live in splendor and make inane and irresponsible decisions without considering the consequences. Mickey 17 is well crafted and Pattinson hit it out of the park as Mickey.

I just couldn’t quite get into the emotional heart of it. I don’t know if it’s because the satire is so on point, or if it just didn’t resonate with me, but I was hoping to feel something. I walked away from Mickey 17 thinking that it was good, but not feeling like it affected me in any profound way. I like to feel films and Mickey 17 didn’t feel like anything beyond the satire.