Mickey 17 (2025)

User Review

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  Barneyonmovies

  8 / 10

  WHAT I LIKED: Bong Joon-Ho's 'Mickey 17,' follows a colonial space mission whose leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) is using "expendable," humans who can be re-printed when they die to test the environment of a planet he's planning to take over. One of these subjects is the titular Mickey (Robert Pattinson), and whilst on an expedition, he encounters a native species who Marshall and his wife (Toni Colette) want to capture and farm to make sauce, but whom he learns to communicate with. In the end, Mickey - and his double who was accidentally printed as a duplicate along the way - plot a resistance against these evil rulers, and all eventually ends happily ever after.
  
  Stories about communicating with monsters and resisting colonisation and exploitation are pretty quintessential to sci-fi, but what makes this one particularly notable and satisfying is how satirically it's all delivered.
  
  Firstly, the protagonist is extremely gormless, but he has an arc all about finding his voice, particularly in the face of his more confident and aggressive clone who wants to "steal," his girlfriend (Naomi Ackie). But most of all, there are the hateful leaders who are delivered as blatant caricatures of alt-right billionaires - complete with smarmy accents, huge teeth, and a desperate need to be liked - who view everything in their paths as a resource that they can exploit.
  
  WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: It's arguable that the comedy undermines the potential impact of some of its themes.
  
  VERDICT: 'Mickey 17,' is a surprisingly comedic but quintessential and triumphant sci-fi story about resisting colonisation and exploitation.

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