Mickey 17, dir. Bong Joon Ho

Bong Joon Ho is no alien to high-concept sci-fi cinema. He's shown himself adapt at creature-features (The Host), and is more than able at politically-attuned near-future world-building designed to interrogate social inequalities (Snowpiercer and Okja). With Snowpiercer, Bong is clearly (to the relief of studio executives, I imagine) able to adapt existing literary work into cinema.

With all that on his resumé, it isn't surprising that Bong and his team mostly hit the target with Mickey 17, an adaptation of Edward Ashton's celebrated 2022 novel "Mickey 7". Robert Pattinson is the titular hapless loser who unwittingly signs up to be an "Expendable" for a mission to colonise a distant planet. This means he is sent out on crazily hazardous missions, and unethically experimented upon; when Mickey inevitably dies, the colony just prints out another Mickey.

Bong fashions Mickey's story into an offbeat and gritty madcap adventure. Bong (and from what I can glean, the source material) isn't interested in taking the concept of cloning oneself to the logical extreme. Bong also doesn't lean too heavy here on the (justifiable popular) anti-work themes seen in Severance. Neither is he terribly concerned about interrogating the modern workplace as a third space (although I wouldn't mind Bong doing his own spin of The Bear or Abbott Elementary). Rather, Bong's goal is simpler: he just wants to have fun in space, often at the expense of poor Mickey. He wants to keep the audience interested through unexpected narrative setups, creating situations where we're both trying to parse how we got here while scrambling to predict what will go down.

The result is a boisterously pitch-black space-stoner comedy larded with gallows humour. There's jokes about calories burnt during sexual intercourse (pertinent, since the colony faces tight rations) and huffing flamethrower fuel (a way to take the edge off your crappy job clearing space junk) that have unexpected payoffs. Above all, it's the absolute joy of seeing two Mickeys in the same frame fight alongside and against each other (and their circumstances) that's worth the price of your ticket.

Pattinson, expectedly, is more than up to that classic actorly challenge of acting opposite oneself. He narrates the film in a charmingly sadsack Malibu-slacker drawl. Against Pattinson's lovable loser, Steven Yuen brings his iconic barely-concealed rage-swagger as Mickey's fake-ass "best" friend. Naomie Ackie, who plays Mickey's love interest, has a jaw-bustingly gorgeous running knee; someone please turn her into a bona fide action star soon.

Mark Ruffalo and Toni Colette play the colony's blustering eugenicist leaders. Ruffalo gives a borderline slapstick performance that melds Trumpian cadence with megachurch pastoral pseudo-confidence. Colette, to her credit, makes the most of a broadly-painted side character who, in lesser hands, would end up as just comedic relief.

The socio-political satire in this film isn't as finessed or developed as Bong's previous work (see Snowpiercer, Okja, and of course Parasite). I don't think that's an oversight or a problem, because Bong doesn't actually want us think too much. He just wants us to have a big, dumb, LOL roller-coaster ride in space. It just so happens this roller coaster has ever-timely yet fairly thin satire thrown in. (While it's worth it to head to the cinema for this film, I'm not sure you need to shell out for IMAX. There was only one shot in the whole scene right near the end that felt worthy of the large format.)

In the end, Mickey 17 lands much closer to Snowpiercer's and Okja's more-or-less happy endings, although there is a dream-logic sequence right near the end (very similar to Parasite) that Bong uses, successfully, to show us why poor Mickey deserves to be treated like one of us: he still wonders if the happy ending he has gotten is real at all.