Mickey 17 is an absurdist, anti-capitalist, Trump-mocking masterpiece – review

As Hollywood studios swiftly kowtow to the Republican regime, there’s a worry that Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s stark yet oddly life-affirming anti-capitalist sci-fi, will be one of the last honest pieces of art to slip under the gates. If that turns out to be true, we should treasure it all the more. The Korean auteur, off the back of his 2020 Best Picture win for Parasite, has taken $80m (£63m) of Warner Bros’s money and, four release date changes aside, secured final cut on a giddy genre epic that answers the existential query at the very heart of our current existence: what’s the point of living in a world built to make us feel worthless?

Here, the idea of an “expendable”, in a story adapted by Bong from Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, is the literalised idea of the capitalist worker: in order to escape his debtors, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) signs up to be an “expendable” on a colony mission to the planet Niflheim. When he dies, his body is simply reprinted – in the grotesque, shuddering manner of an inkjet – and uploaded with his memories so that he can work and die again. By the time we meet him, we’ve reached Mickey 17, 10 Mickeys deeper than in Ashton’s book.

For those whose only familiarity with Bong’s work comes from Parasite, Mickey 17 is different but tonally in check – tender, cynical, violent, humanist, absurdist, rooted in class politics. Yet it’s more of a direct continuation of some of his earlier films, fusing the futuristic utilitarian environments of Snowpiercer (2013) with the cuddly animal rights mascot of Okja (2017).

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Mickey 17 is a sci-fi of the working class, of service corridors by production designer Fiona Crombie and matching jumpsuits by costume designer Catherine George. It’s essentially Bong’s take on Alien (1979) – a comedy about how Weyland-Yutani treats people as fodder, only the xenomorph is far friendlier and interested in community solidarity. All those at the top of the food chain are howlingly awful yet, unfortunately for us, plausible. Mark Ruffalo features as former congressman Kenneth Marshall, with his tan, veneers and vulnerability to exploitation by the religious right – yes, he’s obviously Trump, but Ruffalo lends him enough peculiarities that he works both as a satire and a diabolical creation in his own right. The same can be said of Toni Collette’s sauce-obsessed Ylfa, Marshall’s wife.