Mickey 17’s (Bong Joon-Ho, 2025) predominant quality is its loudness. It isn’t just the absurd choice to subject audience members at the Palais to dangerously high noise levels. Bong’s much-anticipated follow-up to Best Picture winner Parasite (2019) overwhelms with the sheer amount of clanging, banging, shrieking, shouting and all other assortments of noises. The result is sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Robert Pattinson stars in this adaptation of Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7 as the eponymous Mickey, escaping the travails of 2054 earth by signing up to become an expendable as part of an experimental space exhibition led by the Trump-esque Hieronymus Marshall (Mark Ruffalo). His job is to die. Repeatedly. We watch him become incinerated, gassed, chopped and emulsified, his grotesque video game-like existence quickly showing off the cartoon-like ambitions of Bong’s vision.
Because Mickey’s death is nothing personal. He can just be reprinted again and his memories rebooted, allowing for his various demises to be studied for scientific purposes. Reflecting on the fact that much of humanity’s progress has been built on the back of immense suffering, it’s an intriguing idea for sci-fi satire — yet Bong’s adaptation is as on-the-nose as they come.
Pattinson’s voice, impersonating Mickey Mouse impersonating Mickey Rooney impersonating someone who has met a New Yorker once, guides us through large portions of the movie in a non-stop barrage of explanation. Little is revealed or left to the imagination. Instead we are gently led through the nuances of this situation with all the grace of the monsters from The Host (2006). Even as the film promises farce, Bong can’t find a tone that works; he just makes the movie bigger and bigger and louder and louder.
It’s unbearable. Ruffalo’s Trump impersonation is as tired as it sounds, while the excellent Naomi Ackie, playing Mickey’s love interest, is criminally underserved. In fact, this film, costing well over $100 million, is little more than an underwhelming trip through Bong’s earlier, better movies. We see the capitalist science-fiction ideals of Snowpiercer (2013), the monster-madness of The Host and the environmental concerns of Okja (2017), the esteemed Korean auteur comfortably playing in the same sandbox as before, but with infinitely less grace and finesse.
Now Mickey 17’s slightly-odd rollout starts to make sense. Instead of being in the Berlinale Competition today, it played yesterday in London. This choice is now obvious: get the influencers (much love guys; work is work) to shower your film with praise before the critics realise that this is certainly no Parasite. But not everything can, of course, measure up to an almost perfect film. The problem with Mickey 17 is it makes shite like Stargate (Roland Emmerich, 1994) look masterful in comparison.
Redmond is the editor-in-chief of Journey Into Cinema.