Mickey 17 by Bong Joon-ho did something to me.
Mickey 17 is one of those movies that leaves you sitting in silence long after the credits roll, wondering what it just tried to say about you, me, and the strange fragility of being alive. I walked out of it feeling both shaken and oddly hopeful, like I had been put through an emotional centrifuge that spun out my cynicism but left behind this raw sense of curiosity.
The premise itself hooked me from the start: Mickey is basically a disposable worker, sent on a brutal colonization mission where death is guaranteed. But here’s the catch, he doesn’t stay dead. Every time he dies, a new clone of him wakes up, memories uploaded, body reset, sent right back
into the grinder. It’s one of those sci-fi ideas that sounds flashy on the surface but the more you sit with it, the more it itches at something in you. Like, what does that do to a person? Only Nasha, played by Naomi Ackie, keeps him tethered to his humanity—and that tether broke me. When she walks into that gas chamber to hold him, not because she can save him but so he doesn’t face death alone? My throat closed on my coffee. It was a small act but a universe of compassion.
Those jokes that are a bit too personal? As in the case of his co-worker Timo who simply shrugs at the death of Mickey because, as he says, he will just reprint? It was so dark it seemed to be funny, but then you realize it is not entirely fiction- it is the reverberations of how our world treats the expendable. That is the genius of Bong. He enshrouds thick social critique in frigid, foreign environments and acid tongue humor. And is Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) maniacal, gleaming politician so goddamn cartoonish, it is both funny and frightening. Even the villain with his own cult-like colonizing talk show is ludicrous enough to bring a smile, but you feel the ice beneath your feet.
What spooked me last night: the party scene in which the two Mickeys play. The queasy comedy on the same faces, one in need of survival, the other in need of control--it turned my guts. I guffawed, and recoiled, and then only stared with my heart pinned to the wall. That glow when you have had the perfect cup of coffee? It was much the aftertaste of that scene.
The movie made me shiver visually. Painted an institutional gray, the ship corridors were claustrophobic. Then abruptly Niflheim was clear and dirty, icy and pulsating. And the creepers--the tender armadillo monsters--are pretty and representative. They are docile animals destroyed by colonizers. One of the babies is killed and the human beings hardly blink. I almost cried part of myself, there was every ecosystem bulldozer had been driving on, which humanity had been walking on.
And by the end I was not depressed or jubilant, but I was deeply disturbed. The movie does not provide a neat resolution. It provides you with fragments: a ceremony that symbolizes human cloning as illegal, the printer that is being blown up like the last spark of the commodified life, and Mickey 17 who is clinging to his spark of self.
Mickey 17 stays with you because it catches you midway—in between versions of yourself. It asks: what are you willing to give up to matter? And if you are reprinted, how do you stay you?
That’s why I’ll be thinking about it again when I can’t sleep—like late-night thoughts that echo back when the lights go out.
Thumbnail is designed by me on pixelLab and other images are screenshot from the movie