137 min | R | March 7, 2025 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Bong Joon Ho makes a sci-fi satire about disposable labor and corporate exploitation. Robert Pattinson plays the same man dying over and over. This is what cinema should be.
Bong Joon Ho understands that science fiction works best when it interrogates the present through the absurd logic of the future. Parasite dissected class warfare in a basement. Snowpiercer put capitalism on a train. Mickey 17 sends an expendable worker to an ice planet where death is just another job requirement. The film is bleak and hilarious and deeply humane in ways that most dystopian satires never achieve.
Robert Pattinson plays Mickey Barnes, an expendable. When he dies on the job, they print a new version with his memories mostly intact. The catch is each death chips away at who he was until he becomes something less than human. Pattinson plays multiple versions of himself at different stages of degradation and finds distinct characters in each iteration. This is transformative work. Naomi Ackie plays Nasha with warmth and pragmatism. Steven Yeun brings his usual intensity to Timo, the mission architect who views people as variables. Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo fill out the colony leadership with performances that find the banality in authoritarianism.
Bong shoots on VistaVision and every frame is composed with intention. The ice planet looks hostile and beautiful. The colony interiors feel cramped and institutional. The production design creates a future that feels lived-in instead of art-directed. The score by Jongnic Bontemps does essential work. The editing by Yang Jin-mo, who cut Parasite, keeps the film moving through tonal shifts that would destroy lesser films.
The script adapted from Edward Ashton’s novel refuses easy answers. This is not a story about heroic resistance or individual triumph. This is about what happens to people when the system treats them as renewable resources. Bong makes you laugh and then makes you feel complicit. That’s rare. That’s what great filmmaking does.