Bong Joon Ho's Mickey 17: A Bold Take That Works (almost) Better Than The Book

After six years since Parasite swept the Oscars, Bong Joon Ho is back with Mickey 17, a sci-fi fever dream adapted from Edward Ashton’s Mickey 7, starring Robert Pattinson as Mickey Barnes.

This collaboration is an absolute win. Pattinson delivers one of his best performances, pulling double duty as Mickey 17 and Mickey 18, and it’s insane how much he transforms. He doesn’t just act differently, he sounds different. The voice he crafts for Mickey 17 is almost unrecognisable from his own, and then there’s Mickey 18, who is just off in all the right ways. He’s unhinged, detached, almost psychopathic. There is never a second of doubt about which version of Mickey we’re looking at, and technically, it’s seamless.

The script takes significant departures from the book, but in a way that works because Bong makes it his film. You can see the Parasite and Okja fingerprints all over it—the biting social commentary, the dark humour, the tension between the powerful and the expendable.

Mickey Barnes (Pattinson) is an Expendable on the glacial colony of Nilfheim, meaning his job is to die—over and over—only to be reprinted each time. In the book, he gets up to Mickey 7, but Bong amplifies the absurdity by having him reach Mickey 17. It’s routine, it’s monotony, and Bong captures the sheer horror of dying over and over again, especially in a grim montage where Mickey is used as a lab rat to test vaccines for planetary survival. But here’s the kicker: being a multiple is strictly forbidden. There can only be one Mickey at a time. When Mickey 17 falls through a crater and is presumed dead, his best friend Timo (Steven Yeun) doesn’t even hesitate, he lets him die and prints out Mickey 18 to avoid the hassle of a rescue.

Except Mickey 17 doesn’t die. He’s saved by the planet’s native species, the Creepers, beetle-slug-like creatures that humans fear and refuse to understand. This is where Bong leans into his biggest themes: colonialism, power, and history being written by those in charge. The humans treat the planet as theirs, see the Creepers as hostile, and refuse to acknowledge that they are the real aliens. There’s a fantastic scene where Nasha (Naomi Ackie) just loses it on Marshall, calling out exactly this: the humans keep calling the Creepers "aliens" without realising they are the intruders.

Mark Ruffalo plays Kenneth Marshall, the expedition leader, who in the book was a serious military figure, but here is reimagined as a deluded, power-hungry politician. He lost two elections back on Earth, so naturally, he sets off to colonise a planet and make himself dictator. He’s hilarious in this role. It’s impossible not to see the Trump parallels, his expressions, his mannerisms, the way he soaks in everything his wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), whispers to him. Ylfa wasn’t even in the book, but she’s such a strong addition, constantly manipulating her husband, making him even worse. Despite both of them being terrible humans who see the population of Nilfheim as their subjects, they are deeply bonded to each other, which makes them even more ridiculous.

Then there’s the absolute horror of how the humans treat the Creepers, paralleling real-world animal cruelty. At one point, Ylfa, obsessed with her grotesque smoothies and sauces ( it's a whole thing ), cuts off the tail of a captured baby Creeper, blending it into a drink . The worst part? They don’t even consider the Creepers they’ve captured as babies—just "other," something lesser, something to be consumed. It’s disturbing, but it fits perfectly with Bong’s style of commentary.

But the real core of the story is Mickey 17’s growing existential crisis. Throughout the movie, people ask him, what is it like to die?, a question he’s always been able to brush off. But now, with Mickey 18 beside him, he starts to feel the real horror of non-existence. For the first time, he realises that if he dies, he might not come back as himself. Because Mickey 18 is different, and if Mickey 18 exists, does he still matter? That’s where Pattinson really shines, making the two Mickeys feel like completely separate entities, while also forcing us to wonder how much of the original identity of Mickey Barnes is being persevered every time he gets reprinted now that we can see the clear differences between Mickey17 and Mickey18.

Despite taking huge liberties with the source material, Bong somehow makes it work,

even elevates it. The story is sharper, the themes hit harder, and the characters feel even stronger. The existential dread, the power plays, and the unsettling reality of being an Expendable all land in a way that’s even more direct than in the book. The result? A film that’s funny, unsettling, thought-provoking, and visually stunning. The action is slick, the social commentary sharp, and Pattinson proves once again why he’s one of the most interesting actors working today.

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