Mickey 17 Is Painfully Obvious with the References
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I heard people on Mastodon critiquing Bong Joon Ho's 2025 film Mickey 17 comparing it to a similar film by Duncan Jones called "Moon". Those people say that Bong Joon Ho didn't play enough with the main concept of the film and that it has lost a lot of its potential. But in my opinion the gimmick on which the film was sold is not the main point. It's not even why the film was made in the first place.
Living during an era which could be described in movie pitching terms as "World War 3 meets the Cold War" there are certain aspects of the world that needs satirizing. Which Mickey 17 does very well.
The aliens ( or natives to be correct ) in the film are the most clear reference to both American colonization and the current violence in the middle east. Due to how strange they look, they are automatically perceived to be a threat. And even when they act friendly, like when they saved Mickey, the fact that they didn't kill him is rationalized away almost immediately by everybody involved: "Oh his meet isn't great because he is a clone made of waste" and stuff.
Kenneth Marshall ( played by Mark Ruffalo ) is another blatantly obvious reference. This time to Donald Trump. A lot of people on earth seem to hate him, apart from a group of people that idealizes him as some kind of super-human. Those same people ware red hats. Not ones saying "Make America Great Again", but "The One and Only", still the reference is as clear as day.
The Mickey cloning gimmick is there to probably to explain away some otherwise rather dumb plot contrivances. For example, humans can breathe on a different planet and interact with living creatures there. In something like "Alien" this kind of thing is used for mystery, even though some people perceive it as lazy writing.
I think Bong Joon Ho was trying to solve this issue and many other similar issues by having a person that can die, without it being a big deal, on which the scientist could figure out how to make people breathe on that planet and not die.
By the way. I love the idea that tripping over a cable that uploads brain program to the brain, made it so some of the personality of the person who developed the machine bled into Mickey 18. Which by the way was nicely contrasted with the personality of Mickey 17, both played wonderfully by Robert Pattinson.
Anamaria Vartolomei character ( the serious white girl with a strange crash on Mickey 17 ) is weird. She seems to be a fanatic of the Kenneth guy, but then she questions him in the dinner scene as if she is anti-Kenneth. But then she swaps back to being pro-Kenneth after that. It's hard to get what is going on. Maybe there is a metaphor somewhere there which I didn't understand.
Even though she has very little screen time, the scientist girl played by Patsy Ferran is fucking marvelous. Especially in that scene when she tries to speak to Mickey in the natives language.
There is an interesting twist with Naomi Ackie's character. When she confronts both Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 in the same time. She made it feel like I could both expect that from her. Yet based on the anticipation, I could believe her to react completely differently to that. This is my way of praising her acting but trying not to spoil the scene. lol.
In short: The clone gimmick is there to solve plot problems. And the marketing was too aggressive with that, because other than that, the movie is very political. Even though, in a satirical kind of, parody way.
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