Worth seeing:

for Pattinson's double performance in a thought-provoking, sci-fi romp that feels fresher than you'd expect from its familiar ingredients

Director:	Bong Joon-ho
Featuring:	Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Anamaria Vartolomei, Cameron Britton, Haydn Gwynne, Holliday Grainger, Ian Hanmore, Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Ackie, Patsy Ferran, Sabet Choudhury, Steve Park, Thomas Turgoose, Tim Key
Length:	137 minutes
Certificate:	15
Country:	South Korea, US
Released:	7th March 2025

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

In the near future, Mickey (Robert Pattinson) and his friend Timo (Steven Yuen), find themselves running for their lives when they fall foul of a ruthless money lender. Their only hope of survival seems to be to flee the planet, so they try to join a mission to colonise a distant planet. The only way Mickey can get onto the space craft is by signing up to be an “expendable” – someone whose body and mind are stored digitally, so that they can be the subject of experiments and then reprinted when they die.

They test a vaccine on him. He dies. They reprint him. They test a spacesuit on him. He dies. They reprint him. Mickey 2, Mickey 3 and so on. He starts a relationship with a security agent on the mission, Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who doesn’t seem to mind whether she’s sleeping with Mickey 14, Mickey 15 or Mickey 16.

Then we get to Mickey 17 – who falls down a ravine during a mission on the surface of their inhospitable new planet. Timo finds him and collects his weapon but leaves him to die, as he’ll be reprinted anyway. But as Julia Roberts said in Pretty Woman, “Big mistake.” When Mickey 17 manages to escape – with the help of the indigenous creepers – and make it back to his quarters, he finds an unwanted surprise.

Mickey 18 has already been printed and has designs on Nasha. But with the rules prohibiting what are known as “multiples,” Mickey 18 is not just a problem for Mickey 17 – but for the whole mission.

The leaders of the colony – a power-hungry, fascist failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his eccentric, sauce-obsessed wife (Toni Collette) – want to get rid of the Mickeys and the creepers – creating an alliance they’re not prepared for.

WHAT’S IT LIKE?

You can imagine how Mickey must tire of his job; the first thing anyone says to him when they meet him is, “What’s it like to die, Mickey?” But part of the point of this film is that dying is different when you know you will just be reprinted and carry on from where you left off.

The latest thriller from the Oscar-winning Parasite director Bong Joon-ho is based on Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, was made in 2023 and due for release in 2024 but – given parallels some are drawing between Mark Ruffalo’s right wing politician and the current incumbent at the White House, its delayed 2025 launch makes the satire all the more potent.

Aside from the political satire, Bong also takes aim at class wars – as he did in Parasite – and the main narrative device – the frequent death and rebirth of its main character echoes a range of previous films and TV shows, from Groundhog Day to the TV movie 12:01 and the more recent Amazon Prime sci-fi Upload. He also has some interesting things to say about the relationship between colonisers and colonised, conjuring up memories of more films about human outposts, such as Moon.

Pattinson is fun in both – different – characters, while Ruffalo and Collette deliver an appropriate overdose of sleazy camp. The creepers are imaginative and the production design is functional – largely familiar metallic space-craft corridors or icy-white landscapes.

There are some narrative inconsistencies – Kenneth Marshall is a self-confessed white supremacist, aiming to start a white colony on the new planet so why would you take so many black people with you? And while like all the Mickeys before him, Mickey 17 is meek and mild, accepting of his fate, the inevitability of the endless cycle of death and reproduction – Mickey 18 has attitude and arrogance that help us distinguish the pair but doesn’t seem to fit in with the conceit of the same, stored personality being uploaded each time.

There are elements of dark comedy intertwined with effective – if not always original – action sequences. Much of the plot feels either derivative or predictable but Bong and Pattinson, in particular, manage to keep this thought-provoking, sci-fi romp feeling oddly fresh and fun.