It’s Not Cheating If It’s With Your Clone: Josh Pearce and Arley Sorg Discuss Mickey 17

Capitalism, in fiction and in real life, depends on expendable (that is, cheap) labor. Slaves, serfs, indentured servants, children, undocumented migrants, gig workers, (now science fiction and real life start to blur) robots, assembly-line automation, “AI.” Mickey 17 extends logically next to clones, which are worked literally to death and then simply reprinted in fresh bodies for their next job.

Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) signs on to a colony ship headed for a new world, becoming an Expendable, which means he will be cloned for the express purpose of being put in mortal danger. He is experimented upon, killed, and resurrected through seventeen iterations, each time being printed from the ship’s recycled sewage: human waste, chicken bones, and the like.

Along the way, Mickey falls in love with Nasha (Naomi Ackie) and the two of them make a life together under the dictatorial shipboard regime of failed politician/budding cult leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette). Following a potentially sexist stereotype, Ylfa controls Marshall by whispering in his ear, and Marshall controls every aspect of their crew’s lives, even down to counting calories. As expected in a movie about clones, Mickey gets double copied, and so Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 must learn to share.

Arley: Did you read the book?

Josh: No, I haven’t. Have you?

Arley: No. But I wonder how much of this is in the source material and how much of it was changed by the director. I was excited because of Parasite, and I really liked The Host.

Josh: Yeah I was looking forward to this one for a while because it was delayed by the writers’ strike and it’s Robert Pattinson in a Bong Joon-ho spaceship movie.

Arley: I didn’t even recognize Pattinson. I am not necessarily a fan or anything, but don’t have anything against him. He just registered as “very basic dude” to me, so that might be good acting?

Josh: We don’t get enough spaceship movies that are worth watching, unfortunately.

Arley: Agree. Not a lot of actual science fiction. And we’ve talked about how so many movies are remakes, rehashes, and all that.

Josh: I was really into this for the first two-thirds, maybe, and then I felt the ending just didn’t live up to everything that had been set up earlier, or what the preview had indicated.

The film is certainly filled with interesting ideas. Setting the narrative in a self-contained environment like a spaceship makes it easy to critique or satirize a stratified society, as with the train in Bong’s 2013 film Snowpiercer. Life on the ship is so strict that sexual activity is declared a waste of calories, though this doesn’t stop Mickey and Nasha from misbehaving, a very 1984 “rebel from the waist down” situation. Amongst such food scarcity, Ylfa is fixated on typical affluent frivolity, namely perfecting a series of sauces for her excessive banquets.

Arley: Some aspects of this reminded me of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and I thought what that film was doing in terms of commentary on corporate life and capitalism, this was attempting to do, at least to some degree, in terms of politics and religion, though this seemed more “in passing” and not quite having the focus of Brazil. But I think if you liked the humor in Gilliam’s movie, you will like a lot of the humor here. The way the clone printer evoked a dot matrix printer or some other old school process, for example, reminded me of Gilliam’s omnipresent pneumatic tubes. What were your three favorite things in this movie?

Josh: Robert Pattinson’s performance (at least as Mickey 17), the potential for a lot of these story ideas, and… I’m having a hard time coming up with a third because the more I think about this movie the more frustrated I get with it. I think the alien design was cool, although I kind of wish they weren’t in the movie at all.

In the world of Mickey 17, having multiple clones of one person is considered the ultimate sin, driven by religious moral panic over the possibility of one soul being unable to inhabit two bodies. This, of course, is a non-issue in real life: twins are genetically clones, and nobody in our world seems to consider them a problem. From a materialism viewpoint the fact that Mickey keeps getting reconstituted from meat slurry, like a sausage, raises a whole Ship of Theseus paradox: is he even the same person every time he gets cloned? The film shows that each clone has separate personalities, which would indicate that they are distinct persons. The script appears to be arguing with its own concept of what a clone is but then, rather than resolving the issue, sweeps it all under a rug and starts up some other subplot about aliens.

Cloning movies often create an opportunity for actors to show off their range while playing multiple versions of themselves, and Robert Pattinson throws himself enthusiastically into the task—his separate personalities are unique and you can even distinguish the clones just through body language, though it’s sometimes hard to understand what he’s going for with his Mickey 18 performance. Mark Ruffalo portrays a recognizable tinplate tyrant with fishlips and red-hatted sycophants. It’s vicariously entertaining to watch such a buffoonish villain meet a violent end, but political commentary in Mickey 17 feels like merely the garnish and not the entrée.

Arley: There were two or three shots that I thought were cool, like the scene where everyone is waiting to sign up to go into space, and they have that floor to ceiling shot, with the massive spiraling staircase. But a lot of the story seemed like standard cis-hetero-dude-centered wish fulfillment. Mickey, again, is this very basic guy who happens to pull not just one hot woman, but two, one ostensibly otherwise a lesbian…? The first woman inexplicably—and, of course, instantly—completely fixated and dedicated. Not to mention constantly horny for him. Steven Yeun was easily my favorite in The Walking Dead and has had great performances in many roles. He does solid work playing an asshole here, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who watched Beef. Naomi Ackie did well, and Ruffalo was a bit over-the-top and hammy, which I think was intended. Like Robert De Niro and some of the other actors in Brazil. Okay, so would you recommend Mickey 17?

Josh: I don’t think so, because I was too disappointed by the ending. It didn’t stick the landing. Started off so well, though! It did not meet my expectations—I thought that once Nasha had both Mickey clones and was trying to get them into a threesome, and then that other woman showed up and wanted one for herself, that this literal sexual revolution would spread through the ship as an expression of resistance to fascism. All these people would be having sex, even though it costs them too many calories—

Arley: Yeah and they’d be starving, but still finding human connection. It would also give more purpose to the wish fulfillment beyond just wish fulfillment. Like, okay, start with wish fulfillment, but then take things to an intriguing place. You know, beyond, “Bro, I got two chicks after me!” Naturally, neither “love interest” has dreams or desires of their own, of course, beyond Mickey. Nasha had goals before Mickey: to be the most badass person on board with a gun. She achieved that—before the story starts—and now her only goal is to be with Mickey. Let’s really not talk about a Bechdel test.

Josh: Calories are the direct currency on that ship. So once the workers all find out that Mark Ruffalo and his wife are gorging themselves upstairs, you’d think they’d fucking riot.

Arley: There were so many potential moments or reasons for uprising or resistance. Which, again, would lend more meaning to the story.

Josh: Instead, there’s a completely manufactured new threat, which they can solve by making a magical alien translation device. It feels like such sloppy writing at the end. Actually what’s interesting is to compare this to LX 2048, which we said was also crammed with scifi ideas, though it spent a little more time on each one.

Arley: And that was about clones, too.

Josh: Was it? Oh yeah, the “insurance spouses.” I forgot about that part.

Arley: The story here is mainly Mickey’s journey to “becoming human.” It’s a pretty superficial discussion of the classic science fictional question “what does it mean to be human.” The journey takes him from being Expendable and copied over and over to being singular and being seen as “a person.” It’s basically Pinocchio.

In the end, for us, not Bong Joon-ho’s best, and don’t expect any number of Roberts Pattinson to salvage it.

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Written and directed by: Bong Joon-ho (based on the novel by Edward Ashton)

Starring: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette & Mark Ruffalo

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