Spoilers below.
What does it feel like to die? That’s the question Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) of Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 gets asked the most.
For those who don’t know, Mickey is an “expendable” worker on a space mission to colonize the planet of Niflheim. He’s tasked with the most dangerous, life-threatening jobs on the ship. If something goes awry and he dies, well, the lab can just print a new version of him and he can start again. These responsibilities include breathing in a new planet’s air to test it for viruses, so the scientists aboard the ship can find a vaccine, or exposing himself to radiation, so others can research how it affects the human body. As such, Mickey has died multiple times (this is the 17th version of him), but thanks to technological advances, he’s “reprinted” with the same memories.
Bong, who explored classism and privilege in previous works like the upstairs-downstairs drama of Parasite, or the hierarchical cabins of Snowpiercer, explores a similar theme in Mickey 17. Mickey has the least desirable job and the lowliest work of all professions on his ship, but he’s desperate; he and his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) are on the run from vicious debt collectors after their macaron business flopped.
“They’re printing Mickey out so that he can die, and in that concept is all the comedy and tragedy of the film,” Ho told the LA Times. “In real life, you see a lot of jobs that end in fatal accidents. When that happens, the worker leaves, another worker comes. The job remains the same—it’s just the people who get replaced. You can call it the capitalist tragedy of our times, and in this film it’s even more extreme.”
Although Mickey 17 is set in what feels like a kookier, more provocative alternate Star Wars universe, it tackles the issues of our world today: insecure dictators, extreme poverty and debt, a dying Earth, xenophobia, and the ethical questions posed by new technologies. “For me, that is the point of making a sci-fi film,” Bong told the LA Times. “It seems to be a story about the future, about another planet, but it’s actually a portrait of us now and the reality around us, not of somewhere far out in space.”
Perhaps the most notable parallel is Mark Ruffalo’s Marshall, a failed senator with a small army of fanatics who leads the colonization of Niflheim. He has outrageous veneers, a wife named Ysla (Toni Collette) who’s obsessed with making sauce, and the backing of a conservative church. He controls the media and is emboldened by sycophants. He’s obsessed with creating a “pure” race of humans on their new planet home. While Bong hasn’t said outright that Marshall is inspired by Donald Trump, his inspirations do include tyrants throughout history, like the Philippines’s Marcos regime or Romania’s Ceaușescu couple.
Marshall is so obsessed with creating the perfect colony—and most importantly, getting all the credit—that he has his team excavate a piece of stone from the planet for them to carve their names into for posterity. But to his surprise, when the rock is cut open, two armadillo-like creatures come rolling out, sending him and all the ship’s passengers into a panic. The guards shoot one of the mysterious animals to bits and capture the other for testing. These strange little guys are dubbed Creepers, mainly because they creep out Marshall and his wife Ylsa, and they’re native to this land. The passengers see them as dangerous beings, but Mickey learned otherwise during one of his life-threatening excursions, when he fell into a ditch and wound up in a Creeper cave. Instead of eating him alive, the Creepers helped Mickey get to the surface so he could safely return to his ship. The only issue is that once he went on board, the crew had already printed a new version of him because he was presumed dead. With Mickey 18 now in the picture, there are two Mickeys existing at the same time, living in the same bedroom, assigned the same job, and in love with the same woman (Naomi Ackie’s Nasha). But they’re not exactly the same; 17 is meek and submissive, 18 is aggressive. Though they first fight each other to remain as the designated Mickey on the ship, they team up with Nasha to save the day.
First, things don’t go to plan. Mickey 18 tries to shoot Marshall in the face during the rock unveiling and only further adds to the chaos. He gets himself, Mickey 17, and Nasha arrested. But when the Creepers find out what happened to one of their young and start seeking revenge, Mickey 17 and 18 are called to another dangerous task. They must fight off the Creepers, who are now circling the spacecraft in an ominous swarm. They have no choice; if they don’t oblige, Marshall will set off the bombs strapped to their bodies. The whole setup sends Nasha into a fit of rage, scolding Marshall for his bad leadership and stupidity. It feels like a cathartic scream we’ve all been holding inside in our real lives, nevermind if the script feels a little on the nose. She especially hones in on Marshall calling the Creepers aliens: “WE ARE THE ALIENS!” she tells him. It’s classic colonizer behavior, invading someone else’s land and not seeing oneself as the problem.
Still, Marshall sends the Mickeys off into the herd of Creepers. (Ylsa also wants them to cut off their tails so she can use them to make juice.) Luckily an ally from the lab gives them a makeshift translator so they can communicate with the beasts out in the snow. The Creeper leader, the Mama, the biggest of them all, explains their grief and gives the Mickeys an ultimatum to share with their master: If the crew returns the other Creeper baby alive, and one human dies in exchange for the lost child, they’ll be even. If not, the Creepers will scream at a pitch so high that it’ll make every living human’s brain explode. The Creepers’ lives are not replaceable like Mickey’s. If they can’t bring one of theirs back to life, they’ll settle for justice instead.
So, Mickey calls for Nasha to bring the baby Creeper, even though Marshall has it hanging over a breathing fire. With the help of some crew members, she’s able to set it free. She dashes out of the ship to get the infant back to its mother. But Marshall notices the hole in his plan: Are his lowly servants negotiating with the locals instead of him? Shouldn’t he get the credit for this peacemaking deal? This could be his Washington crossing the Delaware moment; future generations will see photos of this historic day, with him at the center.
He decides to change the narrative and meet the Mama himself, accompanied by his team and their camera crew, who are now filming this expedition as propaganda. The film is really exhilarating here, full of adrenaline, the score swelling, and the performances at their peak. Marshall and his lackeys forge into the swarm of Creepers on tanks hoping to make history—and then blast these “aliens” with guns after the photo op. But the Creepers are clever; they pile on top of each other into swirling mounds to confuse their enemy. While Marshall & Co. fall for the trick, Nasha meets Mickey 17 to hand the baby over to Mama. The first half of the deal is done.
Meanwhile, Mickey 18 gets separated from his counterpart and climbs onto one of the trucks to attack Marshall with his own hands. Knowing that death is part of the deal, he reaches for Marshall’s bomb triggers, hoping to blast both himself and the dictator into oblivion. Marshall notices him hesitating. “Yeah, I’m afraid,” Mickey 18 admits. “It means you’re human,” Marshall responds.
Across the battlefield, Mickey 18 gives a knowing look to Mickey 17 in order to say goodbye. Before 17 and Nasha can stop him, the truck explodes, confirming that 18 sacrificed his life and Marshall’s to save everyone else. The Mama is pleased with the bargain. The Creepers retreat.
Six months later, we see the fallout of this attack. The rebels were put on a long trial that politically divided the court. Eventually, Nasha was elected their new leader. Timo was attacked by his debt collector, but he killed him off and got away with self-defense. The colony also learned to co-exist with the Creepers, thanks to improved translation devices. After close study, the creatures also revealed that their threats to explode human brains was just a bluff.
There were rumors that Ylsa was taken to an asylum and cut her wrists, never to be seen again. But she did appear in one of Mickey’s dreams. He saw her in the lab, printing a new version of Marshall and implying that she was reprinted too. It’s an eerie and convincing figment of his imagination, and though it was just in his subconscious, it reflects a dark truth: that another oppressive evil will take root after one falls. And on a more literal level, one can see the parallels with today’s billionaires attempting to de-age with ridiculous procedures. If the poor are expendable, the rich want to be eternal.
Perhaps the better solution isn’t just to get rid of one dictator but to get rid of the classist system as a whole. The Niflheim colony seem headed down that route when they decide to abolish human printing months after Mickey 18’s death. Among all its problems, this machine has been a symbol of the oppression of working-class people. It has made their deemed replaceability even more obvious than it already is offscreen; positing that those living in or on the brink of poverty are treated so terribly they might as well die over and over again on the job. It’s not unlike the dark themes of Squid Game, in which Korean citizens are so deeply in debt they might as well kill each other off in a bloody battle royale. (Mickey and Timo, after all, joined the Niflheim mission to escape their debt on Earth.)
“Parasite and Squid Game were about the hierarchy of society,” Bong told The New York Times about the two Korean titles’s appeal to international audiences. “Simply speaking, they’re about capitalism. And except for one or two countries, everyone’s living under capitalism—it’s a universal language.”
So it really is the end of an era—and maybe the start of a larger revolution—when the colony holds a ceremony to end human printing, with Mickey tasked with pressing the big red button that will blow up the machine. This gesture is significant for him. When he (Mickey 1) was a boy, he pushed a red button in the car while his mother was driving, which led to an accident that killed her. It was really due to a machine defect, but Mickey convinced himself that it was all his fault. He believed that every bad thing that happened to him since then was deserved because of that mistake. But this version of Mickey learns to let go of his past guilt. He wonders, What would Mickey 18 do? and allows himself to be happy.
Mickey can finally live freely. What will it take for us to do the same?
