There’s something uniquely unsettling about the idea of being disposable. Not just in a philosophical sense — we all feel replaceable sometimes — but in a literal, zero-hour, printed-on-your-contract kind of way. Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 takes this concept and runs with it, crafting a sci-fi film that’s equal parts existential crisis, corporate satire, and Philip K. Dick paranoia-soaked action-thriller.
Mickey 17 follows Mickey Barnes, played by Robert Pattinson, an “expendable” whose job is straightforward: die, when necessary, get replaced, and try not to go insane in the process. Sent to colonize the ice-covered planet of Niflheim, Mickey is part of a mission that thrives on efficiency — and in this future, efficiency means cloning expendables like him to handle the dirty, dangerous, and downright fatal work.
When one body dies, another is printed, complete with all the previous memories intact.
If that concept alone doesn’t make your skin crawl, Bong’s masterful direction ensures the horror seeps in slowly, creeping up on you between moments of dark humour and eerie introspection.
But Mickey 17 isn’t just about the mechanics of resurrection, it’s about what it means to be human when your very existence is commodified.
Pattinson delivers a performance that is at once absurdist and tragic, channelling the ghost of Charlie Chaplin’s The Tramp. Like Chaplin’s silent-era outsider, Mickey stumbles through a system that devalues him, a clown trapped in a machine that keeps spinning without care for his survival. His wit, his exasperation, even each of his small acts of rebellion that feels like a flickering candle in a void of corporate indifference.
It’s as if Bong Joon-ho is staging a futuristic Modern Times, where the factory has been replaced by a planetary colony, and the working-class hero is literally replaceable.
From a Jungian perspective, Mickey embodies the archetype of the eternal return. Trapped in an endless cycle of death and rebirth, he is both the tragic hero and the trickster, defying the rigid order of the mission. He exists at the boundary between life and death, self and other, identity and replication. Each iteration of Mickey is forced to confront his own shadow, the unresolved aspects of his psyche that emerge as he becomes more aware of his disposability.
The colony’s leader, a failed presidential candidate in exile, played with unnerving bluster by Mark Ruffalo, serves as the authoritarian father figure, embodying the oppressive force of the collective unconscious that seeks to control and suppress individuality. Ruffalo’s commander is a figure of arrogance, insecurity, and unchecked authority, a bureaucratic overlord with more than a little resemblance to a certain second-term president. Ruffalo looks like Trump doing an impression of Marlon Brando as Jor-El in Superman looking for the cue cards. His bombastic presence and demand for absolute loyalty echo Trumpian demagoguery, wielding power through fear and confusion while dressing his dumbass mission up as a noble cause.
Mickey, in contrast, is the everyman caught in the gears of history, a reluctant worker who knows the system is broken but lacks the means to escape it. The clash between the two isn’t just a battle of survival, it’s a fight between authoritarian control and the resilience of individual agency.
As Mickey resists, he inches closer to individuation, Jung’s concept of self-realization, where he moves beyond the expectations imposed upon him and attempts to define his own existence. His refusal to die is an assertion of his humanity, a rejection of the machine-like efficiency that seeks to erase his uniqueness.
Mickey 17 is a close cousin of Philip K. Dick’s Beyond Lies the Wub, where the Wub — a seemingly docile, pig-like alien — is consumed by the crew of a spaceship, only for its consciousness to persist by transferring into the mind of its devourer. Like the Wub, Mickey’s existence is one of repetition and survival against an indifferent system that seeks to exploit and erase him.
However, the comparison deepens when considering the indigenous alien species on Niflheim. Much like the Wub, these beings are perceived as obstacles to human expansion, their intelligence and autonomy ignored in favour of colonial ambitions. The colonists treat them as little more than resources or inconveniences, and in the most extreme case, a delicious condiment, echoing the way the Wub is treated as food rather than a sentient being.
Just as the Wub ultimately asserts its consciousness despite its destruction, the indigenous aliens in Mickey 17 resist their imposed erasure, forcing humanity to confront its own assumptions about superiority, survival, and coexistence. Both narratives grapple with the unsettling reality of what happens when those deemed expendable refuse to simply fade away.
The trouble begins when Mickey does something no expendable is supposed to do, he refuses to die. That’s when the film shifts gears from a clever thought experiment to an all-out existential survival thriller. For the first time, Mickey has something to lose. If he’s not careful, he might just find out what happens when an expendable becomes indispensable.
Bong’s signature style — meticulous framing, fluid camera work, and an ability to switch between genres without missing a beat — keeps the tension high. Visually, Mickey 17 is stunning. The bleak, icy landscapes of Niflheim contrast beautifully with the sterile interiors of the colony, creating a setting that feels both vast and suffocating. The world-building is efficient, sketched out through sublime visual storytelling rather than tedious exposition dumps. We don’t need a detailed manual on how cloning tech works, we just need to understand the emotional and ethical implications; just watch Pattinson’s body jerk and lurch through the printer each time he is regurgitated to be unceremoniously tortured and experimented on again and again.
Where Mickey 17 really earns its place in the sci-fi canon is in its thematic depth. The film is laced with critiques of capitalism, labour exploitation, and the nature of identity. The themes sneak up on you casually, disarmed as we are by Pattinson’s earnest, likeable, and horny Mickey. One moment, you’re laughing at Mickey’s deadpan observations about corporate bureaucracy, and the next, you’re hit with a gut-punch realization about the inherent cruelty of his situation.
The question of whether each iteration of Mickey is truly him or merely a shadow of who he once was lingers throughout the film. If our experiences define us but they can be copied and implanted in a new body, where does the self truly begin and end? The very structure of Mickey’s existence is a mirror of Jung’s idea of the fragmented self, torn between competing forces of fate and free will.
Ultimately, Mickey 17 is the kind of film that sticks with you. It’s thrilling, thought-provoking, and just unsettling enough to make you glance over your shoulder every now and then, wondering if maybe, just maybe, you’ve been here before.
Bong Joon-ho has crafted another sci-fi classic, one that entertains as much as it unnerves — and in today’s world, that’s a rare feat indeed.