Director: Bong Joon Ho
Genre: Science Fiction/Adventure
Year: 2025
Runtime: 137 min
If there’s one thing Korean directors – and Asian cinema in general – have taught us over the years, it’s to not expect the movies we want to see. Instead, they often present us with a grittier, more brutal reality (sometimes in a physical sense) than we may be willing to handle. This is especially true when it comes to their unfiltered social critiques, which rarely sugarcoat the truth, or their rejection of that deeply Western (especially American) notion of resilience that tells the audience, “Yes, you can make it” or “If you want it badly enough, you can do it.”
This kind of rhetoric might work for optimists, but it clashes with a much harsher reality. Perhaps that’s why, instinctively or not, we tend to seek out movies that let us escape as far as possible from the real world. And yet, every now and then, Korean filmmakers manage to pull us back down to earth.
That is exactly what many expected from Mickey17, the latest film by South Korean director Bong Joon Ho. Known for his dark and morally complex storytelling – seen in Parasite (Academy Awards in 2020) and Memories of Murder (2003) – he has also explored more Western-style dystopian themes in films like Okja (2017) and Snowpiercer (2013). Mickey17 falls squarely into this latter category.
And yet… it’s exactly the kind of film we didn’t expect to see, for better or worse. But let’s break it down.
In a world that feels eerily close to our own, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is a young man with a series of failed business ventures. Desperate to escape a dangerous criminal boss, he volunteers for a highly “propagandistic” space mission as a “expendable”. In other words, a test subject. His job over the next four years of intergalactic travel is … to die.
Through an advanced cloning process that perfectly preserves his memories, Mickey is brought back to life every time he dies. Again and again, he is sacrificed for the sake of the mission. But what happens when an extra clone is accidentally created? Who decides which version of Mickey is expendable?
Once again, Bong Joon Ho forces us to confront with ethic issues. But this isn’t just a story about choosing between Mickey17 and Mickey18. It is about choosing how to use the technology at our disposal; it is about deciding where we stand in a world – symbolized here by the spaceship – that forces people to die for and because of their work. A world where the weakest continually submit to a power they know they can’t defeat. A world where rebellion begins with one individual before spreading to an entire community ruled by grotesque, caricature-like figures of authority – both absurd and vampiric (who take the form of Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette, though they could just as easily be replaced, quite prophetically, by figures like Trump or Musk). It is about which side we want to be on when a race is threatened with extinction.
There is no doubt that Mickey17 tackles far more themes than it initially lets on. Yet, once again, Bong Joon Ho has delivered something we didn’t expect, both for better – on the one hand, the movie is strikingly relevant, using its sci-fi setting to reflect on very real and urgent social issues – and for worse – it lacks the emotional impact and deep engagement we know this director is capable of, something that could have elevated the entire experience.
In the end, Mickey17 may not be one of Bong Joon Ho’s most unforgettable movies, but it still offers a cynical and grotesque reflection of a society we are already part of. And perhaps that is its greatest strength: a reminder that the dystopia of automation and dehumanization is already underway.
The only question left is: in a world without a Mickey Barnes to sacrifice, what are we willing to do? Who – or what – are we willing to sacrifice?
