A science-fiction film about cloning starring Robert Pattinson should be right up my alley but I held off on this for a while due to its middling reviews. It’s like there are two versions of Bong Joon Ho: the one who can make Memories of Murder, Mother and Parasite; and the one who can make Okja and now this Mickey 17. Though the setup is for the identity crisis of a cloned person, in the end this just devolves into another monstrous creature that is actually cuddly inside movie. The worldbuilding is entertaining in a wacky way and Pattinson acts his heart out but this is a middling, missable film with a misplaced focus on what is most interesting.

On the ice planet of Niflheim, Mickey 17 falls into a crevasse and is left for dead by his scummy friend Timo. Flashback scenes reveal how he signed up to join an interstellar colonization mission to escape crushing debt together with Timo. As an expendable, he is sent on the riskiest jobs including testing experimental drugs only to be reprinted as a new clone every time he dies. Fortunately one of the security agents onboard the ship Nasha takes a liking to him and they become romantically involved. When they arrive on planet which the religious leader of the expedition Kenneth Marshall intends to populate with “pure” humans, they discover that it is inhabited by slug-like aliens they call Creepers. When a large one appears in the crevasse, Mickey 17 resigns himself to be eaten but is instead saved. He makes his way back to base only to find that a new copy of himself, Mickey 18, has already been printed. As multiples are banned with the punishment being the permanent destruction of all copies, the more aggressive Mickey 18 tries to murder the milder Mickey 17. When Nasha discovers them, she is excited and wants to keep both of them alives.

There’s a zaniness throughout that tells you this is a comedy and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Pattinson plays Mickey 17 as a pathetic whelp with a whiny voice and Mickey 18 like a crazed psychopath. Mark Ruffalo chews scenery as the megalomaniac Marshall. When explaining why multiples are illegal, there’s a whole mini-story about how one of the scientists who invented the cloning process turned out to be an insane serial killer. The scientists are stereotypical klutzy nerds and even the Creepers are capable of telling jokes. Every time a copy of Mickey is printed out, his body does a small jerk in the machine similar to a regular paper printer for comic effect. It’s entertaining and mildly amusing but there’s no real effort here to explore the themes of either human cloning or the exploitation of an alien planet. The characters aren’t believable and the dialogue feels off. We have no idea why Nasha is even attracted to Mickey. Marshall’s wife Ylfa keeps going on about sauces in a very odd way. I note that Bong wrote the screenplay himself with Pattinson’s assistance for the Mickey character. I’m not convinced that Bong alone has a good enough ear for English to make the lines work.

One would expect that the premise lends itself to a philosophical exploration of identity but Bong has seemingly no interest in that. The two Mickeys vary so much in terms personality as to be effectively different people and no technical explanation is offered. The only statement that this film wants to make is that disposable clones lead to the horror of disregarding the sanctity of life. It then changes subject to the alien Creepers to distract the audience. No one raises the point that the technology provides functional immortality and how desirable that would be. Early on, the expedition witnesses one of their members die in an accident and Mickey is berated for not dying in her place. The obvious answer is that everyone should be backed up in case they die due to some unforeseen circumstances. I haven’t read the original novel this was based on, but I gather that the author there Edward Ashton thought of the issue and so stipulated that the cloning process is costly in terms of resources. Here it’s so cheap that the expedition kills Mickey for trivial reasons. I suppose Bong means this to be horrifying and funny at the same time. But as a rationalist, I would contend that this setup doesn’t make sense at all and in the real world everyone would want this for themselves.

So no, this fails in every way as a science-fiction film. The visual designs are excellent, it’s somewhat funny in a very low-brow way as Pattinson claims he channeled Jim Carrey’s Dumb and Dumber for this performance, and the implied worldbuilding is crazy. But it’s poorly thought out, relies on lazy, old tropes and is not a good film.