Week 13 (Sept 13 – 19) – Cult Movies: Oh, you thought I meant the other kind of cult movies? Sacrifices to the gods of entertainment must be made, so hop up on the altar!
What do you get when you hand a visionary South Korean master filmmaker an interstellar sci-fi novel about a guy whose whole job is dying over and over again? You get Mickey 17, Bong Joon Ho’s gloriously strange, black comedy. Based on Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, the film drops us into the year 2054. To escape a murderous loan shark back on Earth, deadbeat Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) and his bad friend Timo (Steven Yeun) sign up for a hazardous space expedition to colonize the icy alien planet Niflheim. While Timo lands a gig as a shuttle pilot, Mickey takes the ultimate dead-end job: an Expendable.
Whenever there’s a suicidal task—like testing viral pathogen vaccines or wrangling local fauna—Mickey does it, dies, and gets freshly printed in a new body with his memories intact. After number 17 falls into a crevasse and gets left for dead by a convenience-seeking Timo, he crawls back to the ship only to find that Mickey 18 has already been printed.
Rule number one of the Niflheim expedition is simple: “Multiples” mean total elimination. Naturally, Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 have to hide their existence while navigating a ship run by egomaniacal failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his deliciously devious wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), who have seemingly turned going to the stars into some sort of cult.
Pattinson pulls off a masterclass in dual-role physical comedy. To differentiate the two Mickeys, he switches up his accents and channels a heavy dose of Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber—complete with brutal slapstick injuries. Between dodging Mark Ruffalo’s scenery-chewing villainy, sneaking around with security agent and love interest Nasha (Naomi Ackie) and dealing with a loan shark’s agent on board, things peak when the expedition encounters Niflheim’s native lifeforms, the Creepers. Far from mindless monsters, these multi-limbed creatures turn out to be deeply sentient. When a political stunt goes sideways and a baby Creeper is captured, the Mickeys find themselves brokering an interspecies peace treaty while strapped to remote-detonated bomb vests.
Bong Joon Ho and creature designer Jang Hee-chul (reuniting from The Host) deliver a visually stunning, icy landscape brought to life by top-tier VFX houses like DNEG and Framestore, all underscored by Jung Jae-il’s stellar score. While it faced an uphill battle at the box office, Mickey 17 is a wildly entertaining sci-fi satire. It’s got body horror, biting political commentary, rubbery physical comedy from Pattinson and a surprisingly touching message about respecting native alien life. Plus, how often do you get a sci-fi epic where the hero saves the day by blowing himself up with a clone?
