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Bong Joon-ho (director), Mickey 17, 2025. 137 min.
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Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 is at once an existential tragedy and a darkly comic spectacle—a sci-fi epic that probes the nature of selfhood while revelling in the absurdity of its premise. At its centre is Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), a man whose survival hinges on disposability. The premise is deceptively simple: Mickey’s sole purpose is to die—over and over again. He is an “Expendable,” a corporate clone engineered to perish for the “greater good.” The chilling efficiency of this arrangement is, of course, its horror—but therein also lies its comedy. Bong has long understood that capitalism is at its most insidious when it operates precisely as intended, and Mickey 17 wrings darkly hilarious mileage from its protagonist’s ceaseless disposability. In this closed-loop existence, each iteration of Mickey suffers, dies, and is reborn.
The film’s satirical edge is honed against the bleak absurdities of corporate exploitation and the blind zeal of ideological devotion—personified by the red-hat-wearing loyalists of the mission’s failed political leader, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo). Adapted from Edward Ashton’s novel, the narrative charts Mickey’s existence as an endlessly replicable cog in a remorseless machine. A man of little consequence on Earth—plagued by debt and poor decisions—Mickey does not seek salvation, but duplication. The film’s central irony—that Mickey’s continued existence is predicated upon his expendability—interrogates a broader theme: the commodification of life itself.
As Mickey 17 encounters Mickey 18, the narrative shifts from a mere meeting of duplicates to a dialogue between competing understandings of selfhood, autonomy, and the irreplaceability of individual experience. In a sequence of dark hilarity, Bong stages the reprinting process with mechanical indifference—when the ship’s distracted scientist fails to catch Mickey’s freshly minted body, he crashes to the floor with a dull, wet thud. And then, of course, he must get back up. There is no alternative. If Mickey 17 is about anything, it is about the weight of existence—a man who, by all logic, should have long since surrendered to meaninglessness yet refuses to do so. His journey to the planet is not one of grand ambition but of necessity, spurred by earthly debts and an ill-advised investment in a macaron store with his childhood friend Timo (Steven Yeun), leading to a desperate escape from loan sharks with a taste for the theatrical.
And then there is Nasha (Naomi Ackie)—the one fixed point in Mickey’s otherwise unmoored existence. It is love that complicates his status as expendable, love that makes his endless deaths feel unbearable, love that renders him, at last, more than a mere iteration. It is in their relationship that Mickey 17 finds its emotional core. If a man can always be replaced, what makes this version of him matter? And in Robert Pattinson, Bong has found the perfect conduit for his particular brand of tragicomic heroism: a man trapped in the loop of his own existence, who keeps getting up, who keeps going, who insists—against all reason—that he is not done yet. Bong’s films have always been about the collision of tones, the horrifying and the hilarious. Mickey 17 is no different.
If there is one theme that emerges most forcefully from this chaos, it is the question of worth. Mickey is told, repeatedly, that he does not matter—that his survival is incidental, that his existence is a technicality, that he is, ultimately, nothing more than a replaceable asset. And yet, against all odds, he insists on mattering. In this sense, Mickey 17 is not just a film about the mechanics of replication, nor even about the ethics of expendability. It is a film about the struggle to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be more than just a number in an endless sequence of interchangeable bodies. Look back on the film after its conclusion, and its thematic coherence becomes all the more apparent. The exploitative nature of the mission, the cult-like devotion of Marshall’s followers, the precision with which the system eliminates inefficiencies—all of it builds towards a singular idea: that the most radical act in a world designed to erase you is simply to refuse erasure. In the end, this is what makes Mickey 17 a quintessential Bong Joon-ho film. It is a story of the downtrodden, the discarded, the ones who were never meant to win—and yet, somehow, do.
Hovering above this maelstrom of identity crises and corporate dehumanisation is Marshall, a character whose every intonation, posture, and preening self-importance exudes the grotesque charisma of a certain real-world demagogue. He is a man who sees himself not merely as a leader but as a messianic figure—a visionary guiding humanity to a new frontier. If Snowpiercer’s Wilford embodied the cold, detached logic of neoliberal exploitation, Marshall represents its modern, populist incarnation—performative, self-mythologising, utterly convinced of his indispensability. And yet, Bong does allow room for levity. Mickey 17 is, for all its darkness, a deeply playful film. From Nasha and Mickey exchanging banter about sex positions to Yifa’s (Toni Collette) bizarre obsession with finding new sauces in the void of space, the film luxuriates in moments of absurdity. This, however, is no mere indulgence; rather, it is the very engine of Bong’s storytelling.
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Kenneth Marshall, played by Mark Ruffalo, is a fusion of demagoguery and televangelist spectacle
From the moment Mickey steps into the frame, he is already dead—or, more precisely, already disposable. His existence is an almost obscene parody of the capitalist labourer: infinitely replaceable, stripped of autonomy, and yet somehow still clinging to the illusion of selfhood. This is a film where capitalist greed and corporate dominion exist in tandem with religious zealotry, where the figure of Marshall is a fusion of demagoguery and televangelist spectacle. His mission is ostensibly one of salvation—humanity’s last-ditch effort to escape an Earth ravaged beyond repair—but in practice, it is little more than an act of megalomania. His vision for Niflheim, an icy wasteland as inhospitable as the world he claims to have left behind, is one of purity, of control, of the replication of Earth’s most insidious hierarchies.
The film’s exploration of identity and autonomy reaches its most compelling depths in its treatment of Mickey himself—or rather, the Mickeys. Each iteration is distinct, yet they are all irrevocably tethered, fragmented pieces of a man who is both singular and plural. To be expendable is to be the body sent out first, the worker whose sole purpose is to die so that others do not. Mickey’s existence is not his own—it is leased, iterated, and repurposed each time he dies, reborn as a new number, uploaded with the memories of his predecessor, and thurst back into the machinery of survival. The film opens on what should be his final moment: Mickey 17, alone, waiting to be devoured by the worm-like Creepers that populate the planet Niflheim. And then a mistake occurs. The Creepers do not kill him. They take him home.
Therein lies the crux of the narrative—Mickey is still alive. He makes it back to base, only to find that Mickey 18 has already been printed in his absence. Once a man becomes two, he ceases to be a commodity and instead becomes a problem. The Expendable is only useful so long as he remains singular, obedient, and resigned to his fate. Mickey 17 is perhaps less concerned with answering the questions it raises than with exposing the sheer absurdity of a world that deems them necessary in the first place.
Bong, in his strange way, crafts something surprisingly sentimental—a film about what it means to be loved when the self is so easily erased, and what it means to cling to identity when identity is treated as a product. Mickey 17 is a weird, wild ride. Bong delivers another madcap genre chimera, spinning a dizzying mix of tones with masterful control—even if the landing wobbles a little. It’s messy, certainly—the film bites off more than it can chew, introduces themes it does not always have the patience to resolve—but there is something compelling about its insistence on asking the questions anyway. The film is far from perfect, but even when it stumbles, it does so with the kind of confidence that makes its flaws easy to forgive—or perhaps even admire.
Header image © Marc Lafon.
How to cite: Singh, Ananya. “Dying for a Living: Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 and the Horror of Being Replaceable.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 13 Mar. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/03/13/mickey.
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Ananya Singh is a writer. Her work has been published in FirstPost, Deccan Herald, Madras Courier, and elsewhere. She can be contacted via ananyadhiraj7@gmail.com and @priyadarshi_12 on Instagram and X. [Read all contributions by Ananya Singh.]