Robert Pattinson in ‘Mickey 17’ (Photo -Warner Bros. Pictures)
“What’s it like dying?” is a question asked repeatedly to the protagonist of Mickey 17, and maybe it’s like feeling nothing, which was how I felt while watching the movie.
Mickey 17
Directed by Bong Joon-ho – 2025
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan
Except boredom, maybe.
I was disappointed, because I liked director Bong Joon-ho’s earlier work Parasite and 2003’s Memories of Murder.
But Mickey 17 didn’t work for me. The beginning was intriguing but after a half-hour or so I found myself asking, “What is this movie about?”
At first, it seemed to be some quasi-Cartesian take on the mind-body problem as Robert Pattinson, playing the eponymous character, is a cyborg of recycled body parts (and other waste material, apparently) with a portable mind and memory that can move body to body, each one his. With the ability to die repeatedly and usefully, he’s at the employ of Kenneth Marshall, played by Mark Ruffalo with the sneer and cadence of our current President.
Maybe, I then thought, it’s a Jekyll and Hyde tale as a duplicate Mickey is made when the first is hauled away by disgusting creatures—half-mollusk, half-wholly mammoth, with multiple claws—and is thought to be dead which paves the way for the second (or eighteenth) Mickey to be printed and uploaded with saved data, only this Mickey has a harsher outlook on existence than did his previous incarnation, though I suppose dying 17 times will do that to you.
Or maybe the movie wanted to be Dune 3 with the desired spices of Dune 2’s Arrakis now altered to tasty sauces that Kenneth Marshall’s wife will not stop for anything to get. “Sauce is the litmus test of civilization,” she says, but as played by Toni Collette, an actress I otherwise like, she wants to hunt down, eviscerate, and otherwise liquify the creatures to harvest their corrective to the universe’s jaded palate. Like Ruffalo, Collette plays her part with all the nuance of the nonstop train that circles the globe in Joon-ho’s previous Snowpiercer.
By the time Pattinson as both Mickey’s are surrounded by the thundering herd of hairy slugs on whatever snowbound planet they are on, I pretty much had lost interest.
Not to be wholly negative, I thought the musical score by Jung Jae-il had some interesting passages, too bad they weren’t in a better film.
> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, Regal Paseo, Regency Academy Cinemas, IPIC Theaters, Regal Edwards Alhambra Renaissance, AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, AMC Santa Anita 16, and Regal UA La Canada.
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