by Riley Glover
There is a popular philosophical critique about the concept of sci-fi teleportation that has existed for quite a minute now. The idea goes a bit like this: imagine a Star Trek style teleporter that could take every molecule in your body and transfer it over to a completely different place. Now, when that occurs, are you actually teleporting a person or are you killing that person by deconstructing their molecules and then creating an exact clone with the same memories at another place?
Since we do not have teleportation, it is a purely philosophical question but one that affects people in that it completely deconstructs the idea of a soul. If you are murdered but have an exact clone with the exact memories that lives on immediately after, would that be an acceptable replacement for immortality? You wouldn’t be able to continue your consciousness directly, but a version of you would continue to exist.
Now, what if you could theoretically have a malfunction one day and now have two versions of that person, an original version and a cloned version, running around and eventually interacting with each other. What does that do to your sense of self?
This is the baseline existential quandary that Mickey Barnes is thrown into in “Mickey 17,” the long-awaited film by director Bong Joon-Ho. This comes after his first ever foreign language best picture win for “Parasite” in 2020. Like that film (and frankly all his movies if we want to get real), the film uses its conceit to explore similar themes of class exploitation in a way that goes beyond simple retread into a cathartic thematic follow up.
The key that unlocks the ideas of the film is how poor Mickey got to his position. Coming out from a lower-class background of debt, Mickey (played by Robert Pattinson) signed himself up as an “expendable” on a colony ship trying to settle new homes away from the dystopian planet they live on called “Earth.”
An “expendable” on this trip means that their memories and DNA are hooked up to a cloning machine, thus making it so that when this Mickey dies during the job they can just pop off another Mickey to take his place. So, despite going off to a new world to help spread the “seeds of humanity,” he is still in a similar social ladder as before with only his love life with security guard Nasha Barridge (Naomi Ackie) giving him any social peace. Except for one day, while trying to do a colonization mission, he is accidentally believed to be dead and now Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 (also played by Robert Pattinson, but he’s a jerk now) are running around trying not to be executed for such a mishap happening.
While the obvious route to tell this story would be an existentialist scenario, Bong’s natural storytelling inclinations means this existentialist horror has been molded into his often class and environmentally conscious storytelling. It’s worthy of note that this is the same director behind both “Snowpiercer,” also a class-conscious story about people on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale with the recurring usage of big black metal technology contrasting with snow covered planets, and “Okja,” also having a “snap, crackle, and pop” energy and weirdly cute animals connected to themes of environmentalism. It is difficult to not see this movie as him trying to perfect his previous films that used the English language prominently and push them into further, wilder heights than before to the point of being almost off putting.
The major villain of the story is Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a manic failed politician and media figure in charge of the ship who explicitly uses the trip to help heal his wounded ego and to spread a quasi-religious agenda of spreading the most pure human beings possible across the stars and exterminating anyone in his way. He is a big talking politician with a distinct speaking style, lots of strong body language, and a rabid fan base that has red hats labeled with big white words. And that is all that can be said about without spoiling any major plot beats in the film.
While the whole film was written and directed nearly two years prior to the 2024 political election, it is very difficult to not make the connection. At times the film comes off as a political satire about what is happening right now to the point where it feels uncomfortable. This is clear in the continuing exhaustion of blunt political allegory in so much media, reflecting the despair that many people have been feeling over the past decade.
Bong Joon-ho is thankfully always a little bit better than that. Despite the often-dark subject matter at the heart of his movies, Bong is not someone who succumbs to nihilism quite that easily. His films frequently tell stories of people on the lower end of social and economic ladder finding at the very least a personal peace if not changed for the society that they are in. With “Mickey 17,” cloning disrupting the finality of death and the continuance of consciousness gives these themes of the cost of working-class exploitation a human core not simply from the over-the-top satire hovering around the edges, but a quite touching humanity that feels like a step forward into a more material future from Bong’s previous works.
