[COLUMN] Mickey 17's Satire Lands a Little Close to Home | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Mickey 17.

Mickey 17 ostensibly takes place in a dystopian future, where mankind has taken to the stars in an effort to colonize new worlds. The central conceit of the movie is pure science-fiction, focusing on Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), who volunteers to get on the mission to escape loan shark Darius Blank (Ian Hanmore) by becoming the crew’s “expendable”, a human being who can be cloned (more literally “printed”) every time that he dies.

However, despite the film’s futuristic setting, there are moments and choices that feel disarmingly contemporary. The expedition’s leader, failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) insist on a diet entirely of raw food, refusing to eat “burnt meat.” When the seventeenth version of Mickey (“Mickey 17”) arrives at their quarters for dinner, he is served a raw and bleeding steak.

It is the sort of background touch that feels like it belongs in a satirical science-fiction movie like Mickey 17, a demonstration of how outlandish and how deeply silly these wealthy and powerful people have become. However, this detail is not satire. It’s just truth. It is the “raw paleo diet”, and it is quite popular in contemporary culture, promoted by right-wing figures like Joe Rogen, Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. It’s worth noting that Peterson has had very public health issues.

This is not the only moment in Mickey 17 that feels particularly in tune with the absurdity of this particular moment. Around the midpoint of the movie, the subsequent version of Mickey (“Mickey 18”) decides to assassinate Marshall. He walks up to a communal space where Marshall is hosting his chat show “Late Night with Kenneth Marshall”, draws a gun and shoots at Marshall. The assassination attempt fails, with the bullet narrowly grazing Marshall’s cheek.

Once again, Mickey 17 feels less like satire and more like a snapshot of this absurd moment. The botched attempt on Marshall’s life, mid-speech with a bullet grazing his cheek, cannot help but evoke the attempted assassination of Donald J. Trump in Pennsylvania last July. Indeed, Marshall’s response to the assassination attempt, rallying his supporters to trap the “creeper” that escaped from a local rock specimen, recalls Trump’s own raised fist gesture and order to “fight, fight, fight.”

Obviously, the scene in question was written and shot long before that assassin’s bullet was fired. Indeed, Mickey 17 was originally intended to release in March 2024. It is just a grim coincidence, an uncomfortable parallel that is reinforced by the fact that Marshall is easily read as – to quote the Deadline review – “a subpar Donald Trump surrogate.” Promoting the film, Ruffalo has quipped that it feels like he “made a documentary.”

To be clear, writer and director Bong Joon Ho disputes such a reading of the film. He argues that the husband and wife power couple are more evocative of classical dictators like “the Ceaușescu couple from Romania and the Marcos couple from the Philippines.” Then again, it makes sense for Bong to distance the film from Trump, given Warner Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s public support of Trump and the changes that have been made at subsidiaries like CNN to “throw a bone” to Trump.

Bong suggests that viewers are bringing a lot of that subtext with them to the film. “It seems like they projected a lot of the political stress they’re currently experiencing [onto the character],” the director explained in an interview with The Independent, joking that he has been asked about whether he has a “crystal ball” to see the future. “Especially in the scene when Kenneth gets shot, and, of all the things that could've happened, the bullet just grazes his face.”

To be fair, Mickey 17 is recognizable as a Bong Joon Ho film. In many ways, it feels like a synthesis of the filmmaker’s work on Snowpiercer, Okja and Parasite. Like Snowpiercer, it is a big old-fashioned dystopian movie. Like Okja, it is a story about meat, with a particular emphasis on food. Like Parasite, it is a story about wealth, privilege, power and violence. It blends these ideas together into a strange (and admittedly disjointed) confection.

Like Okja, it is possible to read Mickey 17 as a vegan movie about the horrors of meat. Just as the Miranda corporation hopes to use the eponymous creature in Okja as a food source, the climax of Mickey 17 is built around Ylfa’s discovery that the tails of the indigenous creatures on the new colony world (the “creepers”) are a source of “flavor” that she can blend into a “sauce” to help season all the expedition’s raw food.

There is also a recurring sense that Mickey is nothing but meat. Gemma (Holliday Grainger) explains to Mickey how the “printer” works. Each iteration of Mickey is created from a collection of raw organic material – food waste, human waste – that is repackaged and reprinted. As the characters joke, each version of Mickey is effectively “spam.” It does not matter that the characters don’t actually eat Mickey. He is still just a raw material to them, like the uncooked steak.

One of the cuter visual gags in Mickey 17 is the way that the film presents the process as a literal printing. The machine occasionally gets stuck or has to pull Mickey back in by a few centimeters to complete its work. It very obviously evokes 3D printing, which – at the moment – is seen as a potential way to manufacture food. Obviously, it is impossible to 3D print a human being, but Mickey 17 uses the process as an expression of how the expedition understands Mickey.

There are other smaller cues lifted from Bong’s other recent movies, including an emphasis on smell. This perhaps traces its roots back to Okja, when the director visited an abattoir as research. Asked about the hardest part of the experience to forget, he replied “It’s the smell.” Smell is a major motif in Parasite, with poverty seeming to have a discernible odor. Bong noted of the black-and-white re-release of Parasite, “the smells seem more intense.”

Smell is a recurring motif in Mickey 17. As he follows Gemma through the bowels of the ship, he notes that he is lured by the smell of her hair, citing a memory that he cannot quite place. When Alan Manikova (Edward Davis), the father of the process of human cloning, is introduced, it is with a fixation on smell, first smelling his own fingers during a press conference and then subsequently smelling his own duplicate. In the dull and grey world of Mickey 17, flavor and scent are everything.

Still, even more than Snowpiercer, Mickey 17 feels like a love letter to the absurdly heightened science-fiction movies of the 1980s and 1990s, most obviously those directed by Paul Verhoeven, like RoboCop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers. Indeed, with recent news of a new adaptation of Starship Troopers, it’s hard not to think about Verhoeven’s film while watching Mickey 17. This is another story about stupid humans waging war against bug-like aliens they assume to be monstrous.

Mickey 17 is an easy film to appreciate on that level. It is cartoonish and silly, but also incredibly violent. The production and costume design is incredible, with a lot of the movie being shot on real stages with real props, lending the film a tactility that is rare in films at this level. There is a lot of very fun and very clever worldbuilding, a lot of detail that is hinted at rather than explained, giving the sense that this is a fully-formed albeit completely surreal dystopian future.

However, there is also something disconcerting in the way that this fundamentally absurdist and bleak vision of the future feels so attuned to this precise moment. Of course, films like RoboCop were undeniably of their moment, informed by the general vibe and mood of the Reagan era. Michael Miner described it as “comic relief for a cynical time”, a satire that extrapolated from contemporary trends to an absurd degree.

It feels like that sort of dystopian satire has become less surreal and more grounded over time. In 2013, writer Ed Neumeirer told CNN, “We are now living in the world that I was proposing in RoboCop.” It’s not uncommon for retroactive reviews to note that the film feels a lot more anchored in reality than it did on initial release. Justin T. Westbrook opined that RoboCop “hardly plays as satire today.” David Houghton suggested that audiences live “waist-deep in the reality” of RoboCop.

As such, there’s a very strange sensation watching Mickey 17. The film is obviously science-fiction. Human printing does not exist yet and interstellar travel is not yet viable, not to mention the colonies of strange alien creatures. However, many of the finer details of this surreal world feel plausible in a way that the jokes in RoboCop or Total Recall did not. Elements of the film that should be satirical instead just feel like reflections of a broken reality.

Of course, there has been a lot of debate about whether the current political moment exists beyond the range of satire, that it is simply impossible to parody the inherent absurdity of this particular climate. After all, the current President of the United States was famously the direct inspiration for the villain of the comically grim future presented in Back to the Future, Part II. Audiences don’t need to watch dystopian satires. They are perhaps living in one.

There is a lot to recommend Mickey 17, even if it ultimately feels trapped between its desire to produce a loose comedy about multiple versions of Robert Pattinson working menial jobs on a colony ship and the demands of a major studio release with a budget of $118m to have a clean three-act structure. At the same time, it’s hard to escape the sense that these sorts of goofy and cartoonish science-fiction satires of late capitalism feel increasingly on the nose.

And not because the movies have changed.