Time-Wasting Sci Fi

 “Mickey 17”film by Bong Joon Ho, 2025

This is a dystopian space 'comedy' about a disposable worker stuck on an ice planet in 2054.  With the advent of human cloning through a digital meat printer injecting everything from vegetables to shit into the mold, it can re-create dead people.  And Mickey is 'it.' His memories are kept in a database and inserted each time he dies.  Mickey is up to his seventeenth life on the planet.  Ho was the director of Parasite and the class issue is fairly obvious here.  Most real workers are actually also disposable, so Mickey’s no fluke.

Mickey has no skills and is escaping from a poverty-strewn Earth run by corporations and deadly loan sharks, which isn’t far off the mark. He’s a bit of a half-wit and signs up to be a disposable. The meat printer was designed by a psychopath, but that doesn't stop the program.  The space ship to the planet, and the colony once it gets there, is owned and run by a blowhard Tech bro, which should ring some bells. Mark Ruffalo gets to ham it up as this obnoxious Overlord. 

After dying a bunch of times in Nazi-like experiments as a 'team player,' Mickey is reported missing in a crevasse, and so a multiple clone, Mickey 18, has been created.  This Mickey 18 is at first somewhat cruel and bloodthirsty, so something went wrong with the cloning.  Multiples of one person are illegal in this world and against ‘god’s plan’ or some such drivel.  This is the complication which leads to Mickey 17s life being put in final jeopardy. 

In his wanderings through the snow fields, Mickey 17 met sentient ‘creepers’ who save his life from the crevasse.  They are sort of like wiggly armadillos with rasping suction mouths, but in the end they become allies against the Tech Bros, the loan sharks, the stupid co-workers, the cruel ‘expendable’ program and its cloning machine. The colony lives happily ever after in the final battle.

The actors are Euro-Americans, not South Koreans, so this film is aimed at the U.S. market more than the Asian.  To me, other than the ‘thin satire’ and obvious social pokes at Silicon Valley ‘transhumanism’ and creatures like Elon Musk who are in love with space, the film seems to be an exercise in gruesome and trivial fantasy, a wasted pastiche of twists and turns.  Why?  As David Foster Wallace might have remarked in Infinite Jest, post-modern entertainment has become a catatonic diversion from life.

Don’t waste your time unless you are a die-hard sci-fi fan. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “science fiction,” “Parasite,” ‘satire.’ 

The Cultural Marxist / June 4, 2025