Film Review - Mickey 17 (2025)

Mickey 17 is based off of the novel and is the new film by Bong Joon-Ho whose previous film was the Oscar winner Parasite, this story concerns Mickey (Robert Pattinson) who leaves Earth for the ice world known as Nifilheim where he is known as an “Expendable” meaning that when he dies his body is reprinted and he comes back to life, while there he meets Nasha (Naomi Ackie) who he falls in love with as well as Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) who is the leader and with some goals of his own.

Mickey 17 reminded me a lot of Paul Verhoeven’s satirical sci-fi efforts from the 80s and 90s Robocop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers where society has descended down a certain path and the people are seen as expendable for the greater cause be it in cybernetics or fighting a pointless war against an alien civilization or harnessing the resources of another world to amass power for those in charge and Bong Joon-Ho doesn’t hide his feelings about the future world created in this movie.

Pattinson does double duty as Mickey 17 and 18 (who is created after Number 17 is presumed dead at the start of the film) and Pattinson finds a way (along with Bong Joon-Ho) to differentiate between the two, one is softer with more of a conscious while the other can be violent and angry at times and the dual performance works very well.

But there are a lot of other performances that are good as well, Naomi Ackie (one of the few people to be a bright spot about Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker) is very good as Nasha while Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Daniel Henshall and Anamaria Vartolomei are very good as well in their roles.

But the show stealer for me is Mark Ruffalo as Kenneth Marshall (the name at times kept me thinking of the actor of the same name who played Michael Eddington in Star Trek Deep Space Nine) and while its very clear who he is basing his performance off of it works beautifully as this is a great villain, a slimy bastard with no morals or remorse and oh so fun to watch every time he’s on screen, you’ll be wanting this guy to get what’s coming to him and its about fucking time we had a great movie villain again, its been far too long.

If there is a criticism I have of this movie its that it runs a little too long, the runtime is about 2hrs 18mins and it feels that mainly in the climax as I sat there during that part of the film wanting it to speed up a little bit so it could get to the end.

And so that was Mickey 17 and it is really good fun despite being a little long, 3 and a half out of 5.