Mickey 17 Review: Robert Pattinson Costars with — Robert Pattinson! — as Clones in a Wild Futuristic Epic

Mark Ruffalo costars in the new action-comedy from ‘Parasite’ director Bong Joon Ho

South Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite, a lacerating thriller about a family of grifters who overplay their hand, is arguably the greatest film of the past decade. But audiences know him best for wild, imaginative dystopian fantasies, including Snowpiercer (which was adapted into a TV series) and Okja.

Mickey 17 is his latest one, and it couldn’t be more crazily entertaining.

Robert Pattinson, talking in a strangled, hayseed voice, is Mickey Barnes, the most expendable member of a mission to colonize a frozen planet called Niflheim. Deployed on sure-to-be-fatal missions, he’s also put to use as a guinea pig in experiments that would make even a vivisectionist wince.

Luckily, his complete biological map is on file: When one Mickey perishes, a new one is abruptly cloned — or, more accurately, printed out from an immense scanner. Destined to be reduced to mincemeat one way or another, the neo-Mickey’s limp, naked body slowly slides out from the machine.

A human being has been reduced to a strand of fresh, uncooked pasta.

Then comes a snafu. The 17th Mickey is left to die after plummeting through Nifheim’s icy surface: If the cold doesn’t finish him off, he’s all but certain to become a meal for the planet’s only known inhabitants, a species of lumbering but athletic mammoths that look like sea elephants that might have trained for the Olympics. Their cubs (if that’s the word) are cute and plump, soft gumdrops wrapped in gray pelts. Except that they have mouths like lamprey eels.

Mickey survives, however, and eventually stumbles back to base camp —a grim honeycomb of greenish-brown metal — where he learns that he’s already been replaced by Mickey 18. This development brings up an ethical concern that had been bothering experts back on Earth well before the colonizing project began: What happens when you produce not just genetically accurate duplicates, but multiples?

Old Mickey resists ceding any ground (in other words, his very existence) to new Mickey. But Mickey 18 has an advantage. Mickey 17 is as guileless as Candide, while his successor is more aggressive and shifty-eyed. He looks like a mechanic who’d inflate the estimate of your car’s tuneup.

And yet they both end up sharing a bed with Mickey 18’s new girlfriend (Naomi Ackie), who used to be with Mickey 17. It’s a menage a trois with just two people — more fumbling than erotic, but certainly novel. (When it comes to sex scenes, the hell with ethics.)

From here we spring into a broad political satire in which the Mickeys tangle with the colony’s dictatorial leader, a failed American politician named Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, smiling smarmily through capped teeth the size of tombstones).

You can decide for yourself whether Ruffalo is delivering Marshall’s dialogue — bold, loud, jingoistic — with inflections that are meant to lampoon Donald Trump 47. In any event Marshall, a craven idiot, is a raucous, vulgar sendup of the bedrock American principle of Manifest Destiny. Or, perhaps more broadly still, he represents the brutal hegemony of just about any superpower throughout history.

Marshall is determined to exterminate those mammoth creatures, for no real reason other than that’s what he aims to do. Unfortunately, he’s also indifferent to the way these huge beasts are slowly making their way to the humans’ compound, like the trees of Birnam Wood encroaching on Macbeth’s stronghold. (Marshall has his own Lady Macbeth, lethally confident, played by Toni Collette.)

To describe Mickey 17 as a sendup, by the way, is to distinguish it from satire, which would require a deeper cynicism or genuine misanthropic disdain. Both seem alien to Bong’s sensibility. Mickey 17 has the mindless exuberance of a clown car beeping and honking even as it vanishes down into the whorls of a black hole. It lacks the shiny, beetle-carapace hardness of director Paul Verhoeven’s classic space epic Starship Troopers. But, then, genuine misanthropic disdain is part of Verhoeven’s tool kit.

What gives the film a stronger, if fleeting, dramatic grip — what generates Mickey 17 ‘s unexpected, lingering moments of solemnity and sadness — are its metaphysical concerns: What does it mean to have endured, over and over, the awful, inescapable finality of death? Everyone keeps putting that question to the inarticulate Mickey, as if he were a martyr available for postgame interviews. And no one comes away any the wiser.

Make of all that what you will. It doesn’t signify much, maybe nothing at all, given Bong’s exceptional talent for building a universe that you accept on its own dark and peculiar visual terms — and then, going that one better, establishing a coiled narrative that becomes almost suffocatingly intense, saturated with dread and suspense. You don’t watch Mickey 17 — you experience it, you go through it. (The same could be said of Parasite.) Bong lets the action mount to an almost hysterical frenzy: The last third of the movie, in which the beasts amass like bison itching to stampede, is a pure thrill ride that leaves you both exhilarated and exhausted.

You can’t clone a director as original as Bong.

Mickey 17 is in theaters and rated R.