At The Movies: Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 satirises disposable labour

Mickey 17 (M18)

137 minutes, opens on March 6
★★★★☆

The story: Broke and on the run from thugs, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) contracts to be an expendable – a disposable space worker made to perform dangerous jobs because if he is killed, he can be reprinted an infinite number of times, with memories intact. With Mickey on board, a ship leaves Earth to colonise the icy planet Niflheim, under the charge of grandstanding couple Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and Ylfa (Toni Collette). Mickey and security agent Nasha (Naomi Ackie) fall in love. During the journey and on landing, Mickey dies and is reprinted many times over, until something goes awry on his 17th reprint.

Nearly every one of celebrated South Korean film-maker Bong Joon-ho’s films is a social critique.

In crime drama Memories Of Murder (2003), police complacency comes under fire. In monster movie The Host (2006), it is environmental pollution that gets skewered. In drama-comedy Parasite (2019), winner of the Oscar for Best Picture, Bong makes stark the system that keeps a few at the top and others firmly at the bottom.

Mickey 17, adapted by Bong from Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, reuses those themes with a science-fiction twist. If that sounds familiar, it is because he has done it before, in Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017), movies set in a world in which futuristic technology is weaponised against the poor. 

Mickey is a classic schmuck – a slave in all but name, but blind to his exploitation by overlords like Kenneth and Ylfa. 

Like Neo in The Matrix (1999) and nearly every protagonist living in a dystopia, Mickey experiences a trigger event that awakens him to his horrifying reality.

Bong’s story makes a sly divergence from the standard techno-feudalistic narrative, one that allows the film-maker to explore the idea of two selves – the awakened and the unawakened – battling each other. Those wishing to know more can watch the trailer.

He surrounds the science-fiction action with plenty of dark humour, especially around the ideas of techno-birth and corpse disposal.

The visual joke of a wet, freshly printed Mickey sliding out of a white metal birth canal, then, after his inevitable death, casually tossed into a hole in the ground resembling a makeshift toilet is a funny metaphor, as are the skits about his various deaths. Usually, he dies because his employers deem proper safety measures too expensive. After all, it is cheaper to reprint than preserve him.

Ruffalo’s Kenneth is a messianic tech bro reminiscent of Elon Musk, exaggerated with prosthetics that parody Hollywood’s fixation on dental veneers. He and Collette play the villains, but lay on the campiness too thickly to be taken seriously, weakening the storytelling.

Not all the jokes work, but even those that do not provoke laughter should prompt reflection on how societies determine which groups are disposable.

Hot take: Bong’s metaphor for how society sees migrant workers – anonymous, cheap to hire and supplied from a seemingly inexhaustible source – packages a sharp message in a well-crafted, if goofy, science-fiction comedy.