Mickey 17 Review: "Bong Joon Ho's best English movie to date and arguably Robert Pattinson's best movie ever"

Do you ever think about dying? Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) sure does. In fact, it's hard not to in his line of work. Struggling to pay off debts accrued through a failed dessert enterprise – "Macarons are not a sin" – Mickey signs up to die for a living, becoming what's known as an "Expendable" for employers who can give him a new body every time he's killed on the job. And during a four year plus space mission to the ice world Niflheim, death is never far out of reach.

Even when Mickey is very much alive, he's always made aware of the often harrowing deaths he's had to endure thanks to fellow colonists who are endlessly curious to know what it feels like to die. That's because very few people are actually stupid enough to sign up as an Expendable. That means Mickey is a special kind of stupid (or desperate, depending how you look at it). Yet it's safe to say you can never have too many Robert Pattinson's, as this latest effort from Bong Joon Ho attests to.

Like Edward Ashton's 2022 novel that the movie is based on, Mickey 17 challenges the notion of what a soul can be and what it means to live when Mickey is regenerated an 18th time while number 17 is still alive. This mistake has huge ramifications in this future society where "multiples", as they're known, have been outlawed entirely in fear of the moral boundaries they push. Nasha Adjaya (Naomi Ackie) has no such qualms though, making the most of what two Pattinsons in her life might have to offer.

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17+18 = Robert Pattinson's best performance(s)

The key selling point – besides this being director Bong's first film since the Oscar-winning Parasite – is obviously the dual roles that Pattinson plays as Mickey. These two versions of R-Patz are crucial to the film's success, surpassing our already high expectations with what might very well be a career-best role for him (or roles, of course). The two clones aren't as similar as you'd expect, which is very much intentional, and what Pattinson does to convey that is the kind of work that should net director Bong another Oscar-winning movie.

It's Mickey 17's voice that stands out most at first, a strained, awkward thing that feels tangibly crushed almost by the weight of capitalism and the extremes he's endured to survive. Mickey 18 is similar, unsurprisingly, but there's an edge to his voice and everything else too – just a teensy bit reminiscent of his turn at the Batman – that helps differentiate the pair. Even before Nasha uses lipstick to label their bare chests, Pattinson plays both Mickey's with an extraordinary amount of control to help set them apart.

From their posture and movement to facial tics and the inflection of their voices, Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 are both fully-realized, very similar yet still very different people, to the point where Pattinson's chemistry with himself ends up being the kind most actors would kill for. There's a point where 18 makes fun of 17 by impersonating him with a silly, mock voice, which somehow captures the essence of the first Mickey filtered through what the second Mickey thinks of him. That's Inception-level storytelling right there. And that's how impressive Pattinson is in these roles.

The absurdity of it all verges on slapstick at points, deliberately so, channeling the likes of Buster Keaton in a genre-defying performance that also reminds us that this is a genre-defying film. As director Bong does so regularly throughout his work, the script blends humor into what you might usually consider more serious fare. You will laugh out loud multiple times throughout Mickey 17, more than that titular number, I'm sure, yet the weight of what's at stake and the gravity of it all is kept intact.

If anything, director Bong's signature comedic slant helps ground this preposterous sci-fi story, be it through clownish physicality and sight gags (Mickey's "reprinting procedure" stutters and halts like an actual paper printer) or just through the sheer ridiculousness of the other passengers Mickey is travelling with.

An (inter)stellar cast

Chief among them are married duo Ylfa and Kenneth Marshall, played with so much delight by Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo. That's not to say they're fun characters, per se, but their exaggerated cartoonish villainy succinctly nails the camp extremes that evil can embody without diminishing the truth of their evil. Ruffalo is a buffoonish politician-turned dictator who hopes to establish a "superior race" upon settling on (the "pure planet") Niflheim.

Collette is just as good as the malicious power behind the throne, so to speak, a woman whose obsession with securing power for her husband is eclipsed only by her passion for making sauces out of… Let's say unusual ingredients. It's as if director Bong split Tilda Swinton's maniacal villain from Snowpiercer, the indentured Minister Mason, into two equally fascinating, monstrous people.

Playing Mickey's best friend Timo, Steven Yeun is the opposite of them in some ways, arguably the most grounded character in the film. He still brings some laughs though, as does Naomi Ackie whose Nasha is thankfully so much more than just one third of the film's bizarre love triangle. She's the driving force of the film in many ways, kickass one minute, and deeply loving the next. Mickey would be lost without her, and so would Mickey 17, making this the second movie of the year already (following Sorry, Baby) to cement her as one of the best British actors working today.

It's fitting then that Ackie stars in Mickey 17 by one of the very best auteurs working today too. As hinted earlier, there's a lot of pressure on director Bong to succeed with Mickey 17 after his previous hit, Parasite, helped the whole world overcome "the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles" (as Bong himself put it). But like Mickey, the South Korean filmmaker shouldn't be counted out so easily, because it's clear now that rumors suggesting the delays signalled something bad couldn't have been further from the truth.

Double the fun

In his first English-language film since 2017's Okja, director Bong proves yet again that he's a master of his craft, a singular filmmaker whose run might now be the greatest of the 21st century. Every facet of production, from the score and the acting, to the pacing of his script and the production design (rooted in a future not too dissimilar from our own), is essentially flawless.

During Netflix's documentary titled Yellow Door: '90s Lo-fi Film Club, director Bong told viewers, "I don't think I've ever been as passionate about film as I was making [Looking For] Paradise," his stop-motion debut short, yet there's still unbridled passion to be found here in Mickey 17, three decades on. It shines through in every frame, and what's most impressive is that this all comes without compromise. Mickey 17 is unmistakably a Bong Joon Ho movie through and through, adding something new to his unparalleled filmography without just retreading what's come before.

That search for paradise, for something more beyond our means, is the driving force for Mickey here, just as it has been in so many of Bong's previous films, and again, the inequality that inevitably comes with that is embodied with a very specific sense of place. Just like he did in Snowpiercer and Parasite, director Bong makes classism tangible and all-too-real through physical separation, be it through connecting train carriages, the floors of an expensive house, or in this case, the deadly work Mickey carries out on minimum rations while the Marshalls feast and live it up in their luxurious quarters.

That cruelty is best exemplified through the treatment of bug-like creatures native to the planet Niflheim who pop up early on and end up playing a more crucial role than you might expect. These "creepers", that "look like a croissant dipped in shit," according to Ylfa, are far cuter than their insectoid appearance might suggest, evoking the Ohmu from Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, not to mention Bong's own Okja. And just like that classic Studio Ghibli entry (made before Ghibli was technically a thing), Mickey 17 is also an ecological fable, on top of everything else the film strives for.

Throw in capitalism and colonization, not to mention philosophical quandaries on how life, death, and identity converge around notions of what a soul might be, and you could argue this might be too much for one film or even one script to handle. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, it probably would be. But one plot hole aside (around the issue of remembering deaths that occur after a memory back-up), director Bong makes it all seem effortless, just as Pattinson does in not one but two demanding roles. By the end of Mickey 17, you'll feel reinvigorated to live harder and love more than ever, just like Mickey himself does still in the face of his endless deaths.

Mickey 17 releases in theaters worldwide on March 7. For more films that should be on your radar, check out our guide to the upcoming movies to watch out for.