This week’s movie review was for a movie that I have no information from, but I picked it up from the library based on comments I’ve seen on the internet. Mickey 17 came out last year and I didn’t know anything about it other than it dealt with cloning or something?

“Unlikely hero Mickey Barnes finds himself in the extraordinary circumstance of working for an employer who demands the ultimate commitment to his job: to die for a living.”

You know what’s fun about watching a movie you have no expectations for? Because you don’t actually know anything about it? It’s a truly unique experience.

It’s actually really rare for me to watch anything new these days, as I don’t go to the theater and I don’t have any streaming services. Those streaming platform shows I have watched are all based on existing media, usually a book series or something continuing a popular  world. So when I say I went into this movie completely blind, I mean it.

Basically, this is a science fiction movie where a bunch of religious zealots have chosen to take a multi-year journey into space to colonize a new planet following an egotistical former politician with a cult following. And we know that space is incredibly hazardous so they contract Mickey Barnes as an “expendable” – a person who dies repeatedly and then just gets reprinted. They use Mickey to document exactly what happens to a human body with radiation exposure, experiment on with new drugs, to take care of the “you will die to fix this” jobs, and in general to do everything no one wants to do.

He’s treated as a thing and not a person by everyone on the crew, with the exception of Nasha, a security person who he falls in love with who also falls in love with him.

I found the little tidbits of the history and laws of earth fascinating as a very accurate mirror to our current society. Every time we saw Kenneth and Ylfa Marshall, the resident leaders of this new colony, I was reminded about how much the very rich and influential tend to be detrimental to literally everything around them, and how often people in those positions are both heartless and soulless. They did some very horrible things and didn’t care at all about who was hurt, killed, or damaged by their actions. And they’re just like the modern billionaires, which was one of the most difficult parts of this movie – it’s alarmingly close to how our own future right now could unwind.

Overall, this was a different movie, though it did give me a lot of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind vibes, especially towards the end. I’m glad I watched it and glad I picked it up from the library. It’s possible I’ll want to see it again at some point, so I think I’ll rate it as a low three on my rating scale. It got me thinking and has a lot of important points but I don’t know that future views will be as much fun, now that I know what happens.

Mickey 17. Directed by Bong Joon Ho, performances by Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo. Plan B Entertainment, 2025.