By Bob Grimm
Director Bong Joon Ho follows up his 2019 Oscar triumph Parasite with an often-delayed weirdo of a movie in Mickey 17, a sometimes-funny sci-fi mess that feels like a bunch of ideas that never quite came together.
The movie is basically Duncan Jones’ Moon meets Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, with a pinch of MAGA hate thrown in. The futuristic yarn stars Robert Pattinson as Mickey, a failed businessman who chooses to leave Earth as an “expendable,” meaning he will be a worker who will continuously die in the name of science and be reprinted as a clone.
He winds up on some sort of colony ship lead by Marshall, a Trump-like politician, and his wife, played by Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette. This allows the film to be both a clone comedy and political satire. That winds up being not such a great thing.
When one of Pattinson’s clones survives elimination, and another is printed, that leads to two Pattinsons onscreen. The two Mickeys are a little different, making them easy to tell them apart and allowing Pattinson to attempt to spread his acting wings. The complexities of having two slightly different versions of a person is glossed over due to the movie’s overstuffed plot.
The Starship Troopers vibe is due to the ship encountering a hive of bug-like creatures at its destination. The MAGA angle has a bit of fascist lean to it, also like Starship Troopers. OK, so Mickey 17 might be a misguided remake of Starship Troopers more than anything else.
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