Mickey 17: Robert Pattinson delights at the heart of a virtuoso mix of genres (review)

The latest sci-fi fable from the director of Parasite dissects the excesses of our consumer society with scathing humor. To see on Canal Plus.

With 130 million worldwide revenues for 118 million budget, Mickey 17 was a commercial failure. Cruel for Bong Joon-ho’s new satire, broadcast this Friday evening on Canal Plus (and visible in streaming on MyCanal), which Première had defended during its cinema release. Our review:

Imagine for a moment that death was nothing more than a simple bureaucratic glitch, a setback resolved in a few hours of 3D printing. These are the exciting beginnings of Mickey 17new film from Bong Joon-ho in which he dynamites the codes of SF to deliver a chilling reflection on our relationship to life and death. The Korean filmmaker, in perpetual balance between social satire and big Hollywood spectacle, has clearly found in this story of a dispensable clone the ideal playground to push his singular vision to its limits.

On the frozen planet Niflheim, “expendables” like Mickey are the last link in a perfectly oiled chain of exploitation: human scouts sent out on reconnaissance, reprinted after each death to continue their mission. This beginning might just be another exercise in dystopian style, but in Bong’s hands it becomes a political fable of quite enjoyable ferocity. Robert Pattinsonimpressively precise, embodies 18 different versions of the character, juggling between the pathetic and the sublime, the grotesque and the frightening, the stupid or the Machiavellian – but always with astonishing mastery.

It is he who, with a simple raise of an eyebrow or a change of tone, shifts the film from genre to genre. But if the actor seems to be in control, we are indeed with the author of Parasite. And as in Snowpiercer, Bong uses the science fiction framework to deploy literally hardcore social criticism. The metaphor is clear: Mickey is the archetype of the worker sacrificed on the altar of profit, his literally expendable body serves the interests of a faceless corporation. It goes even further, since the film flirts with reflection on identity and memory…

Mickey 17 is indeed striking for its balance between existential horror and black humor. Scenes where the hero questions the nature of his own existence alternate with burlesque sequences worthy of Dr. Strangelove. Mark Ruffalo, as a demagogue politician with Trumpian accents, embodies this grotesque dimension with obvious delight and thanks to his crazy actors, the permanent oscillation between registers, the filmmaker’s trademark since The Host, reaches heights of virtuosity here.

Served by the spectacular photography of Darius Khondji, the production constantly plays on contrasts. The sanitized spaces of the space base contrast with the organic brutality of Niflheim, while the very process of “reprinting” the Mickeys is filmed with an almost documentary precision that underlines its absurdity. Bong refuses the temptation of clinical and disembodied SF, anchoring his story in a disturbing corporeality – the Mickeys are dirty, they sweat, bleed, decompose and even fuck.

By choosing to represent cloning as a process as trivial as inkjet printing, Bong desacralizes transhumanism and the question of immortality. It is in this tension between the sublime of the issues and the baseness of the means that the film finds its subversive force. Mickey 17 is not so much a film about the future as an allegory of the present, where human life has become an adjustment variable in the profit equation.

By embracing the codes of the Hollywood blockbuster while subverting them from within, he signs perhaps his most ambitious work to date. A success all the more remarkable because it is part of the very system it criticizes, proving that it is still possible to make a cinema of resistance at the heart of the Hollywood machine

By Bong Joon-ho. With Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Mark Ruffalo… Duration 2h17. Released March 5, 2025