Like most people, I was delighted when Parasite won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. During one of his other wins that night, director Bon Joon Ho gave one of my favorite (and most referenced) speeches when he talked about overcoming the “one-inch tall barrier” of subtitles to expand your horizons and discover so many amazing films.
Mickey 17, his much-anticipated follow-up to Parasite, doesn’t challenge English-speaking audiences with subtitles, but it does make us wonder how much blunt political allegory is still palatable in these tumultuous times
Robert Pattinson is Mickey Barnes, a down-on-his-luck earthling who looks to escape his debt to a loanshark by journeying to the planet of Niflheim, run by Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a very obviously Trump-like leader, and his sauce-obsessed wife Ylfa (Toni Collette).
Because Mickey has no discernable skills that would make him valuable to a space mission, he signs up to be an expendable—a human who can be endlessly re-printed to serve as a guinea pig for everything from vaccines to figuring out survivable radiation levels. Mickey’s job is to die over and over again to further the advancements of humanity.
He develops a relationship with security agent Nasha Barridge (Naomi Ackie), whom he views as being out of his league because she’s smart and caring. She’s well aware of his career, but unlike the scientists or other members of the colony, seems sad to see him constantly die in such painful ways.
During one routine mission, the 17th version of Mickey falls into an icy crevasse and is left for dead—that is, after all, the job—but he’s rescued by an alien species referred to as “creepers”. When he makes it back to the base, he discovers that they’ve printed out another copy of him, something that could result in his permanent deletion.
Together, Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 have to figure out a way to save themselves, the creepers, and humanity.
Mickey 17 was one of my most anticipated movies of 2025, having been delayed nearly a year from its original release date. Sadly, I think this is a case where the delay hurts the reception of the film because the political climate has changed so much in the course of a year that a movie with blunt political messages like this just doesn’t hit the same now.
I was fully on board for the double Mickey storyline. Pattinson has become one of our greatest weird voice actors—your move, Tom Hardy!—and I love seeing his career trajectory from dreamy teem heartthrob to eccentric dude in auteur movies. He’s proven that he’s a real actor, and he continues to show off those skills here, making both Mickeys feel distinct while also retaining a similar core since they are essentially the same person.
His scenes with Ackie lend some emotional weight and valuable connection points for the audience in a story that can feel bloated with characters and subplots. I wished more of the focus could have been on Nasha and the multiple Mickeys.
Instead, we get far too many storylines that crash into each other in terms of tone, leaving us with a jumbled mess that makes it hard to grasp onto those stronger pieces.
This is most (painfully) obvious with the Marshall/Ylfa storyline. Ruffalo is clearly playing a Trump character, his cult of true believer followers even dawn red caps, but aside from showing us a selfish, ignorant, uncaring leader, Mickey 17 doesn’t really have anything to add to the conversation. He’s a bad guy with evil motivations. His wife is even worse, willing to sacrifice anyone and anything in pursuit of something as trivial as a tasty sauce for her meals. We get it. Yet the movie thinks we need to be hit over the head with it again and again as if it’s giving us some new insight every time.
Perhaps this would have played better when we weren’t constantly barraged with horrible news and awful political developments every waking moment of the day, but in our current world, these characters just come off as annoying and exhausting. There’s no greater statement, there’s no big metaphor, they’re just one-note versions of their real-life counterparts, and I nearly groaned in the theater every time it cut to them.
That storyline is one of many that feels like a setup that never really pays off. We also have a subplot with Mickey’s frustratingly lucky friend Timo (Steven Yeun), a barely-realized narrative about the scientists on the mission (led by Cameron Britton and Patsy Ferran), and a potential love square with the Mickeys and Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei) another agent in the colony. It’s way too much spread way too thin for anything to really connect, and it causes the pace to suffer every time we cut away from something interesting to give us a quick surface-level glance at some other plotline.
Mickey 17 has some great ideas at its core. The messages are important and we get a few breakthrough moments when we can see what this movie could have been, but the execution is messy. I found myself wanting to love this movie but appreciating the idea a lot more than the actual experience of watching the film.