What is it that gives life meaning? Is it the brevity? Is it what you do with it? Who you meet along the way? Is it the service you provide or the service provided to you? On the one hand, life can mean absolutely anything as long as we ascribe something to it (“42”); however, on the other, there’s an everyday roteness that humanity gets used to that makes life taken for granted. Or, at the very least, one in a series of things that we take for granted and, perhaps, lose something along the way. Filmmaker Bong Joon Ho (Snowpiercer; Okja; Parasite) adapted the 2022 novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, a story about an individual whose job it is to literally take on the worst assignments, which are likely to kill him, with the understanding that he’ll be genetically reprinted and brought back to do it all again, into Mickey 17, a sci-fi action comedy with a satirical bend. With its extraordinary premise, one would expect great exaggerations in order to find its hilarity amid the absurd, yet, once more, Bong has created a tale that not only works on multiple levels, it reminds us that life has the meaning we ascribe to it. Now, after repeated scheduling moves and a theatrical release in January 2025, Mickey 17 comes back to Earth with around 30 minutes of making-of bonus materials.
Robert Pattinson as Mickey in in MICKEY 17, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures. © 2025 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
When staying on Earth proves too dangerous, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) catches a ride on a shipliner headed for the distant planet of Niflheim where ship commander and failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), with his wife Yifa (Toni Collette), plans to set up his own colony. Each person aboard the ship is hand-selected for what they can bring to colony, but Mickey, well, Mickey didn’t read the fine print on the job he applied for and doesn’t realize what being an “expendable” means — tough jobs with low life expectancy *but don’t worry,* because they’ll bring you back as a clone — until it’s too late. Even then, with no other options, what else can he do but buckle in and accept it. But when something unexpected happens and a choice between saving himself, saving his girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie), or saving the native species of Niflheim has to be made, being expendable is going to be the last thing he’s worried about.
Having not read the novel, this review will not make any cross-comparisons beyond what is known from the book summary. It’s clear that Bong, as screenwriter, made changes from Ashton’s work beyond the significant number of Mickeys (Ashton’s 7 to Bong’s 17), as well as shifted some of the internal tension of the narrative (away from the issue of resources), however, the bulk of the story appears to be the same in terms of Mickey’s live-die-repeat existence and the potential conflict between Commander Marshall and the native species. These shifts allow for two significant thematic elements to play out throughout Bong’s adaptation: the view of Mickey himself. Sure, this sounds like one thing, but it’s an internal and external perception and it dovetails neatly into the notion of the meaning of one’s life.
L-R: Actor Naomi Acki and director Bong Joon Ho on the set of MICKEY 17, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley. © 2025 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Internally, Pattinson (The Batman) brings a soulfulness to Mickey which makes him almost instantly sympathetic to the audience. He seems to accept his life as expendable, even when it means eating a metaphorical shit-sandwich each day. In fact, especially because it means that. As we learn through the narrative, Mickey comes to accept the position, unprepared as he was for what he was signing up for, because he believes that he deserves to be punished and being killed over and again does that. It’s almost zen-like, the way Pattinson presents Mickey, with a perpetual acceptance of the cruelty of existence and his role within it to absorb as much as he can. It doesn’t matter if he’s soaking up high doses of radiation or inhaling deadly viruses, the pain is temporary, the benefits helpful, and all of it is viewed, by Mickey, as a penance. Upon the moment wherein Mickey, now on iteration 17, fails to die and a clone is made anyway (Mickey 18), Bong does more than simply replicate and have two versions of the same character, he uses 18 as the means to start a shift within Mickey as to whether this Promethean existence is enough for him. Credit, of course, to Pattinson who makes it easy for audiences to recognize Mickey from 18 via physical and auditory differences (standing straighter, speaking more clearly, moving with more confidence, and asserting himself) as the costume design never changes. If people are still holding onto Pattinson’s work from either the Twilight or Harry Potter series, I encourage them (you) to check out The Rover (2014), Good Time (2017), and TeneT (2020) to see just what kind of miraculous and daring performances Pattinson turns in every time.
Externally, the choice to remove resources as a critical element of the narrative means that Mickey can die without concern for consequences. This translates to almost the entire crew viewing Mickey as an appliance, rather than a person. Does one get attached to their favorite pen? Sure. But if they have back-ups, the loss is transient. Post-cold open, Bong illustrates this through a series of deaths in which Mickey is sometimes aware of the mission and, other times, misled, setting up the notion that, as far as the scientists on board are concerned, Mickey’s sub-human with the body being the least important aspect of him and his electronically stored essence being the critical component. As such, Mickey is tossed out to test anything before anyone else on board can be potentially injured. Rather than view Mickey as essential to the development of crew safety and mission success, by positioning his cloning as an indefinite process rather than finite, it enables Bong to hammer home the way that Mickey’s world sees him in concert to himself. Even his own best friend, Timo (Steven Yeun), also a member of the crew, also on the run, doesn’t see him as valuable anymore due to Mickey’s new-found expendability. Even before the film takes things toward a violent conclusion as the people to whom Mickey and Timo escape seek to find them again, promoting Timo to cement his view of Mickey only expendable, the film incorporates an implied narrative thread wherein Timo is primarily responsible for Mickey’s tools not working when they need to out in the field. What difference does it make when Mickey can just be reprinted, right? Timo is but one example Bong utilizes in the satirical elements of the film to illustrate issues of class with Mickey being considered the lowest and Marshall the highest, despite the fact that Mickey is actually the more deserving of accolades.
L-R: Mark Ruffalo as Kenneth Marshall and Toni Collette as Ylfa in MICKEY 17, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley. © 2025 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This element is the least subtle of the film and the one that’s received the greatest backlash as Marshall is, to many, a cypher for the current president of the United States of America. Seeing as the book was released in 2022 and Now-President Trump oversaw the 2017-2020 administration, it’s quite possible this is the case. Marshall, as presented by Ruffalo, plays to a camera constantly, speaks of uplifting all while actually giving the people far less than he takes for himself, and sees himself as a war-time president when any combat is of his own making and would put the wrong people in harm’s way. In my view, Marshall is more of an amalgamation of people like President Trump, including televangelist Jim Bakker and others who embrace cult-like attributes to merge politics, business, and faith. Given Ruffalo’s own known politics, his performance may come off as a Trump parody, but that would be too simplistic and would ignore the way that Marshall leans on Yifa, the use of partial makeup during the “talk show” segments Marshall engages in (only his face/hair; not his hands), Marshall’s organizational language and unifying gesture (“The One and Only” plus tilted extended arm raise), Daniel Henshall’s Preston (a Leni Riefenstahl stand-in complete with black uniform), and that Marshall is cogent enough to utilize convincing language without perpetually denigrating others or using a fourth-grader’s vocabulary. His might be rotted from his own perceived prestige, but what makes Marshall stand out is that he’s actually got some intelligence in there and enough of it that his ignorance is even more dangerous. Though Bong’s introduction of Marshall does imply a certain familiar cult-like following, with the little we know about the state of Earth (mostly normal-looking aside from the massive storm that occurs outside the interstellar airport), Marshall’s mission starts to feel more like a Jim Jones-planned excursion with Niflheim being the place where “humanity will restart.” Earth isn’t going extinct, folks just don’t want to seem to live there anymore, and apparently going to Norse mythology-inspired place is the best option? Has to be if Marshall’s in charge. Or, at least, that’s what the subtext Bong infuses throughout the script suggests. To that end, Marshall is not just one bad leader brought to the silver screen, he’s several, and all of them are threats to humanity.
L-R: Director Bong Joon Ho and actor Robert Pattinson on the set of MICKEY 17, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley. © 2025 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
If you’re curious to go deeper into the film, the bonus features briefly touch on Marshall, though never with any specificity in mind. It’s always about the charisma and the presentation, using the costume and production design to fill in the gaps on who this person and his wife are. Instead, all three featurettes — “Behind the Lens: Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17,” “Mickey 17: A World Reimagined,” and “The Faces of Niflheim” — provide a wide and narrow view of the total production. In the wide side of things, we are walked through the approach Bong uses when directing, such as using storyboards throughout the shoot. Many directors use storyboards in the pre-production side of things in order to organize what each scene is going to look like, but Bong actually brings these to set and gives copies to the cast so that they can know exactly what he wants things to look like. Listening to the cast discuss this, there’s some adjustments necessary, but, otherwise, understanding what it is that Bong is looking for helps to guide where they go with their performances. Additionally, we’re given a sense of the work the costuming and production design teams put in that may seem contrary to expectation. For instance, rather than utilizing a total futuristic look, pens still look like pens and clothing still looks like clothing in order to make the film possess a more natural, grounded look. The clothing, in particular, is discussed as important to the classic elements of the film with the Marshalls being given the brightest, richest clothes and the rest of the crew given understated tones with overlapping colors (greys on greys; blues on blues) with the least exciting and most invasive access ports on Mickey’s wardrobe (to denote his science experiment-like status). Curious about the body printer? You’ll get to learn where the real world and fantasy intersect and how this was the one piece of the set that Bong insisted be the most futuristic and why. Finally, of course, there’s a trip into the special effects that helped bring the planet of Niflheim to reality, including borrowing from Bong’s experience on Okja (2017) to make the Marshall-named “creepers” as grounded as possible, as well as learning that not all things that look like snow (or potato shavings) are what they seem to be.
In terms of the on-disc presentation, this is a bit of a mixed bag as what we see and hear are represented differently in the bitrate. Using the 4K UHD review copy provided by Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment, I played the film on my 4K UHD Sony TV via a Panasonic 4K player with audio through a 5.1 Yamaha surround system. Despite the muted nature of the total film, the picture is quite solid with the blacks inky, the whites distinct, and the few instances of color sharp. In the initial cold open with Mickey on Niflheim, one can easily differentiate between the different striations of ice, the layers of light making some areas brighter and darker, and the incoming creepers that Mickey believes are his ticket to #18. Especially in the darker areas, being able to identify what’s fauna versus ice matters in the sequence in order to best understand Mickey’s quiet resolution to the moment. Conversely, when we get a glimpse at the Marshalls’s quarters, the opulence is everywhere and the 4K UHD captures the range of colors to perfectly convey the striking differences between the haves and the have-nots aboard the ship. The sound, as well, is nicely balanced with the storm on Earth feeling robust against the glass structure of the airport, as are the smaller noises of disquiet that emanate from a baby creeper captured by Marshall’s forces. Overall, it’s a balanced audio mix, enabling home viewers to set the sound and forget it, without having to be concerned about either dialogue or supporting audio cues. Oddly, the bitrate tells a different story with it primarily hovering in the upper 50s before bouncing to the 70s, staying there for a while, and dropping down. There’s no noticeable transition from a scene with a higher bitrate to a lower one, no apparent deresolution in visual or audio elements, but there is no consistency in the bitrate. The odd thing being that Blu-rays max at 40 Mbps, so this 4K UHD presentation is not much better than the Blu-ray in terms of its bitrate. This is likely a combination of two things: the prevalent use of CG to create or extend environments and creatures and the included special features being likewise presented in 4K UHD. As always, if the special features are placed on a Blu-ray disc, then the film has more space on the 4K disc and results in a better quality image. By compressing the film further to make room for the special features, the experience may not change but the bitrate denotes it could be stronger.
At one point in the special features, someone comments that Mickey 17 is a hard film to describe, and that’s true if you’ve got nothing to refer to. If one has seen films such as Moon (2009) and Snowpiercer (2013), then Mickey 17 is a solid combination of the two, though that is a comparison that only gets you so far. The satirical elements exploring class and faith are more specific and humorous than Snowpiercer and Mickey 17 lacks the emotional punch in its conclusion that the other films achieve, but don’t take that to mean that the film shorts the landing. In part due to the powerhouse performance(s) from Pattinson and a striking supportive one from Ackie (Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker; Blink Twice) whose narrative presentation by Bong will lift you up before shattering you to pieces and in part due to Bong’s insistence on avoiding subtlety to hammer home the notion that, regardless of our station, we’re all due respect and love. Being subtle isn’t what makes Mickey 17 worth the exploration, the ideas within it and the way that Bong moves his characters around within the narrative spaces to navigate them are. If you missed your chance in theaters, don’t miss it now.
Mickey 17 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and digital Special Features:
- Behind the Lens: Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 (11:32)
- Mickey 17: A World Reimagined (9:44)
- The Faces of Niflheim (8:00)
Available on VOD and digital April 8th, 2025.
Available on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD May 13th, 2025.
For more information, head to the official Warner Bros. Pictures Mickey 17 webpage.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: Films To Watch, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews, streaming
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