There’s something uniquely deflating about watching a filmmaker you admire struggle with material that should have been perfectly suited to their sensibilities. Such was my experience with Bong Joon Ho‘s Mickey 17, which I approached having deliberately read Edward Ashton‘s source novel Mickey 7—a book I found to be an engaging piece of “PhilDickian” science fiction with surprisingly rich world-building.
For the uninitiated, Mickey 17 follows Robert Pattinson as an “expendable”—the designated cannon fodder for a struggling human colony on the frozen planet Niflheim. Each time Mickey dies, his consciousness uploads into a fresh body with most memories intact, though with subtle differences that accumulate over time. By the film’s beginning, Mickey has died sixteen times, each death ostensibly serving humanity’s colonization efforts. But thanks to a mix-up, another clone is produced despite Mickey 17 not actually dying, the ramifications of which set the stage for the film.
I’ve long considered myself a devotee of Director Bong, and with the exception of Okja, I believe he hasn’t made a truly disappointing film. Unfortunately, Mickey 17 falls into that same strained category as Okja and highlights a concerning pattern in his English-language output. Where his Korean productions like Parasite and Memories of Murder operate as precisely calibrated thrillers, his Hollywood ventures adopt a maximalist aesthetic that feels discordant with his strengths—a farcical grotesquery reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Jeunet that never quite coheres.
The most jarring creative decision involves the expanded role of Mark Ruffalo‘s Kenneth Marshall, transformed into an unmistakable Trump analogue complete with signature caps, dental veneers, and mimicked speech patterns. When reality offers no respite from these figures, must our escapism be similarly saturated? This change necessitates Toni Collette‘s Ylfa, Marshall’s sauce-obsessed wife whose culinary fixations symbolize the decadent obsessions of the privileged class. The metaphor lands with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Pattinson navigates this terrain admirably, having fully embraced his evolution into a “character actor with leading man looks.” His “funny voice guy” approach infuses Mickey with a pathetic charm that occasionally transcends the material. Yet his performance exists within a narrative stripped of the novel’s rich context—the religious framework that explained Mickey’s strange desirability, the complex social hierarchies of colony life, the ethical questions surrounding the Expendables program.
The title change itself becomes emblematic of missed opportunities. Bong has suggested he wanted more opportunities to kill Mickey on-screen, thus the numerical increase from “7” to “17.” Yet curiously, the film shies away from fully exploiting this conceit. From a director so skilled with physical comedy, one might expect a darkly humorous death montage in the vein of Edge of Tomorrow, but instead, we get deaths that occur largely off-screen or without consequence.
Not all changes disappoint. Naomi Ackie‘s Nasha receives welcome development, evolving from the novel’s somewhat underwritten love interest into a fully realized character with agency. Similarly, Mickey 18’s distinct personality shift, while unexplained, leads to a more satisfying character arc than his literary counterpart’s.
As I left the theater, I couldn’t help but mentally reconstruct an alternate version of Mickey 17—one that might have integrated Bong’s visual ingenuity with Ashton’s meticulously constructed world. Instead, what we have feels like Okja transported into the claustrophobic setting of Snowpiercer—a bewildering entry in an otherwise stellar filmography that reminds us that even brilliant directors occasionally lose their way in translation, particularly when navigating between literary adaptation and personal vision.