Set 29 years from now, writer-director Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” imagines a world beyond ours because Earth isn’t worth the trouble anymore.
Failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), taking a page from the Elon Musk interstellar-ambitions handbook, gains a new lease on his career by leading a cultlike space colonization mission to the icy planet Niflheim. And there they are: Niflheim mysterious, oversized, toothy bugs, the native life forms of indeterminate hostility, nicknamed “creepers” by the visiting humans.
The human at the center of “Mickey 17” is Mickey Barnes, a genial sad-sack who has volunteered for the mission because loan sharks are trying to kill him on Earth, along with his dubious friend Berto (Steven Yeun). As an Expendable, Mickey takes the single lowest rung on the job ladder. He’s a human guinea pig on a “Groundhog Day” sort of work schedule: In the interest of science, Expendables are exposed to various lethal threats, poison gas or radiation, etc. Mickey dies many times, and then is reborn. A new body, just like Mickey’s old one, comes out of a reprinting machine, with all his memories and features intact.
The technology making this possible, along with some unauthorized cloning, has caused some fuss on Earth, but off-Earth? No problem. No federal oversight to worry about. The equipment on the spaceship may be a little wonky — in one of the film’s better running gags, the human reprinter machine clearly needs some oiling, and makes noises like a 2003-era Hewlett Packard paper printer — but for Mickey, it’s a living. Dying, but a living.
Where “Mickey 17” takes these ideas takes us, in turn, through a crazily uneven movie only a first-rate filmmaker could’ve made. It’s full of lovely little visual touches and some occasionally funny jabs at the excesses of capitalism and the limits of AI and cloning technology.
It’s also a bit of a chore. Bong, the South Korean visionary whose previous film was the class-warfare masterwork “Parasite” (2019), struggles to compact the source material. The movie comes from Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel “Mickey 7,” which traveled to different worlds, and had more time to interweave the conflicts arising from two Mickeys competing for dominance. Pattinson manages a fine and witty character delineation between good-hearted, passive #17 and steely, brutal #18. This ticklish situation at first entices Mickey’s lover, the ace security agent Nasha (Naomi Ackie, reliably terrific and a true movie star), who sees her sexual options as having improved 100%.
But “Mickey 17” darts away from this “Design for Living” ménage à trois prospect, because there are more conventional story chunks to address. The limitations and frustrations of “Mickey 17” are partly to do with narrative and partly tone. Bong retains a daring and, I think, misjudged amount of authorial voiceover, delivered by Pattinson sounding a little like Steve Buscemi. While the film’s visual design is sharp throughout, blanketed by cinematographer Darius Khondji’s peerless eye for warmth amid chilly thematic circumstances, the satire’s a mite ham-handed. Actors as skillful as Ruffalo and Toni Collette, the craven leader Marshall’s imperious wife, come off pretty pushy here.
You just never know about tone, and how any project mixing sci-fi with political allegory and a fair amount of bleccchy viscera will turn out. Not that many movies try that mixture, but Bong has made at least three, including the superior “Snowpiercer” (2013) and the animal rights and giant pig fantasy “Okja” (2017). These two relate strongly to the themes in “Mickey 17.” I was with Bong’s latest about half the time. The other half? Even a first-rate director can get a little lost in the tone management and narrative streamlining process.
“Mickey 17” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for violent content, language throughout, sexual content and drug material)
Running time: 2:17
How to watch: Premieres in theaters March 6
Phillips is a Tribune critic.
