Film Review
Mickey 17
Oscar-winning Bong Joon-ho's 2025 film
is Mickey 17 but is it any good?
Jonathan Cowie pretends he is not expendable…
Mickey-17 is the latest film from the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho whose 2019 socio-commentary, comedy-thriller Parasite garnered many awards including four Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film) as well as being short-listed for two others, among many other awards, and it garnered a worldwide taking of £119 million (US$266m) at the box office on a budget estimated to be just £9.28 million (US$11,4m).
SFnally, Bong Joon-ho is known for his first English film Snowpiercer (2013) which, like Parasite, was also at heart a social commentary. All of which brings us to Mickey 17 (2025).
What's to be said about Mickey 17? Well, it is firmly an SF film. Additionally, just as Snowpiercer was based on the graphic novel Le Transperceneige (1982), Mickey 17 is based on an early draft of Edward Ashton's (who he?) novel Mickey 7 (2022): Bong Joon-ho was responsible for the script. Further, like Parasite, it is also a social commentary again in part on class, but also 21st century dictatorship politics. Like a number of Joon-ho's films, it does markedly change gear over half-way through and ends up being somewhat a different offering by its end: do not let this put you off.
The underlying SF premise is quite simple: space travel and colonising a planet is difficult and can be deadly. However, using unreliable – and illegal on Earth – technology it is possible to download a person's consciousness and then upload it into a freshly-grown – or in this case 'printed' – body. In SF, his is now an established post-human trope and, perhaps notably, one featuring in a number of Greg Egan's stories. All well and good, so now onto the plot…
Mickey Barnes (played by Robert Pattison) and his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) owe money to a relentless and utterly sadistic businessman. Knowing that they are likely to be killed in a most excruciatingly horrible way having defaulted on a debt, they decide to join the rush to leave the Earth (it is becoming a ruined planet due to over-exploitation (by the rich?)) and colonise a distant new world. Timo becomes a pilot while Mickey unwittingly signs his life away, but in the process guaranteeing himself a place on the space ship, by becoming an 'expendable': someone who is given deadly tasks, who will die and then resurrected in a newly grown (in this case 'printed') body made up from recycled organic material, while having his mind restored from its last back-up point.
Pilot Timo
All this is really a MacGuffin – it is simply a vehicle for the film's plot and allegory – as the film is actually about power, those without it and those with it who use it and abuse it. (Those in power prey on an endless supply of the underclass masses: they are literally considered as 'disposables'.) We quickly learn that the ship they are on is destined to an all 'white' (in the socio-political sense but also actually 'snowy') world where the colonists would 'spread their seed' and populate it all under the rule of the religious politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette).
The religious politician Kenneth Marshal and his wife Ylfa
Having arrived at the colony world, Mickey 17 (16 versions of Mickey having already previously died) falls down a crevasse and is left for dead. A new version of Mickey is printed (Mickey 18), but Mickey 17 eventually makes it back to the ship only to discover he has another him has taken his place: they are both now highly illegal 'multiples'…!
It is at this point the film shifts gear with a focus now shared with that of the stratified ship's society where, at the top, there is Kenneth Marshall with his vision to conquer the planet Niflheim and wipe out its indigenous 'alien' species… (Though it is pointed out to Marshall that on this world it is we humans who are the aliens…)
The local natives of Niflheim on which it is not they who are the aliens
Mickey 17 has a decided art-house feel to it despite its £96 million (US$118m) budget (roughly an order of magnitude greater than that for Parasite). Here we do have to talk about money, before anything else.
Typically a film has to make its budget back plus some for marketing promotion in a month of general release (there can be film festival screenings before then): which for Mickey 17 was a month from Friday 7th March (2025). Yet for much of the rest of March it struggled to reach £82 million (US$100m), so it had not recouped its production costs let alone marketing: marketing can be as much as 50% - 100% of production costs and so Mickey 17 was set to make a substantive loss!
This begs the question, why?
There are two reasons that spring to mind: one anecdotal and one due to recent trends in the way films are released post-CoVID-19. I cannot speak about the marketing in the USA, but I can speak to it in Great Britain. In this country not only have I seen little marketing, the SF fans I interact with have all said the same: many did not know that the film was coming out let alone out! Further, given my TV habits I would have expected to see at least one trailer on TV, but I haven't; if there was one I must have successfully missed it. Indeed the only posters I have seen for the film, apart from those outside cinemas, were on the sides of a few busses when I was down in London. And then there is the way films are released post-CoVID-19: a reminder, CoVID lockdowns took place in 2020 and early 2021. In 2020 only a few films were released and many were postponed to 2021: famously James Bond: No Time to Die was first postponed by seven months and then a second time to 2021when it did well (where it topped our annual SF/F British box office chart).
What a lot of other films did was move onto streaming platforms (the subscriptions to which boomed during CoVID lockdown) as well as DVD. And this set the trend for the past few post-CoVID years: films only stayed in the cinemas for a month – sometimes not even that – before the streamers got it: gone are the days when films would solely stay in the cinema for six to eight weeks. True, the 2023 US writers strike did not help. And then the recovery from CoVID was not brilliant. UK cinemas re-opened in the summer of 2021 and while by September there had been a substantive recovery, the UK monthly box office take was roughly half that of pre-CoVID times. By the end of 2024, UK cinema attendance had recovered roughly 70% if its pre-CoVID box office take rate but, according to Statista, is still about 30% down on 2019.
Western cinema – which basically means Hollywood – drastically needs to re-think its business model and, if nothing else, to go back to late 2010s practices: longer time in the cinema, longer time to DVD, and longer still to migrate to streaming platforms. And if they are to spend a lot of money on a film then they do need to effectively market outside of N. America. Mickey 17 was not let down by it being different: it was let down by studio moguls. Originally having launched Friday 7th March 2025, Mickey 17 was due to move to streaming platforms on Tuesday 25th March, just two-and-a-half weeks after it general release. By that time it had only taken £90.1 million (US$110m) of its £96 million (US$118m) budget and it needed to significantly exceed this if it was to recoup its budget together with its promotional/marketing costs. The studios wisely, albeit belatedly, took the decision to move back the transfer date to streaming platforms to early April. It made back its purported budget after three weeks at the very end of March and early April when, against its budget of £96 million (US$118m), it took £100 million (US$122m) but it is not known whether this includes all its marketing costs. Regardless, be assured, Mickey 17 is far, far better than its global box office take suggests, provided that is you are not seduced into the MacGuffin as the film's primary focus: it is the social allegory that counts!
As for the film itself, well, to be fair, it has to be said, it is a little clunky in places. The explanatory Mickey commentary some may find off-putting: a lot of folk seem not to like such talk-overs but actually I don't mind them. The thing that will spring to mind is that the politician Kenneth Marshall is clearly a Donald Trump-like character. This parody is all too obvious, laid on rather thickly and with all the subtlety of a miners' outing, but potential viewers should remind themselves that the film wrapped its shooting well before Trump took office for his second term (and the spring 2025 bonfire he lit to domestic and global politics): the film was written and shot under Biden's US presidency. Having said that, remember Trump previously queried (the sub-titled) Parasite's, 'Best Picture' Oscar win at a campaign rally in Colorado in 2020 (it wasn't a US film) and this is something that Bong Joon-ho is unlikely to forget. (At the time Parasite's distributor, Neon, reportedly Tweeted 'Understandable, he can't read', and I see that since Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, that that Tweet has been vanished, or is it X-ed?)
Despite this being an uneven film, and the SF tropes presented in a flawed way (the Jerry Pournelle 'it rained on Mongo' [planet of Niflheim] being one such example) this offering is delightfully quirky and, while not polished, I prefer this sort of film any day to the formulaic franchise films to which we are continually subjected. This is why I enjoy a thoroughly good film programme at an SF convention.., that is when we get them. (Sadly, less frequently these days with the new generation of languid conrunners and SMOFs, despite the Glasgow Worldcon's film poll. *). As far as I am concerned, any film that makes you think 'what was that all about?' is in no way a bad a thing. Mickey 17 may not be perfect but expect it on the short-lists of some major 2026 SF awards that have film categories!
Jonathan Cowie
* If anyone thinks who am I to criticise the new generation of Worldcon runners, SMOFs etc. and think that’s a bit harsh, I should perhaps point out that from the 1970s to early 2000s I was on the committees of several SF conventions and additionally the staff of a few others too: all had films screened! (I really am not at all fond of past decade-or-so's conventions whose programmes are overwhelmingly, shoot-from-the-hip, panels: they are such a mixed bag from the quite good, to mediocre, boring, and even the downright bad, that I simply don't waste my time on them. Fortunately, fandom is large and, if you seek them, there are still a few cons out there that have diverse, varied and curated [rather than relying on panellists volunteering themselves] programmes run by folk who – bless them so much – know what they are doing.)
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