Is Mark Ruffalo giving a Trump impression? It’s early into Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 when the actor struts into the frame in a velvety blazer, wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) in tow, gloating as a crowd stands and claps like he’s the second coming of Christ. Ruffalo is Kenneth Marshall, leader of some cult-adjacent Church and one-time presidential candidate behind a new space mission designed to yank humanity from a near-inhospitable Earth and drop it onto Niflheim, a planet in some remote corner of the galaxy. A hopeless narcissist surrounded by a cabal of yes-men armed with cameras immortalizing his every move, he speaks with impossibly white teeth forever bared in a self-congratulatory grimace, nostrils flared, vowels ever so slightly drawn out. In a film ostensibly following not one but two (!) Robert Pattinsons, it’s Ruffalo that takes center stage. And if his diction and mannerisms instantly jolted me back to another real-life narcissist surrounded by a cast of sycophants of his own, that came more as a revelation than distraction.

Bong’s films have long courted Big Topics in our zeitgeist, weaving ecological catastrophes into tales of haves and have-nots (see Okja or Snowpiercer). But his latest speaks to our pestilential present in degrees his previous arguably did not; set as it is in 2054, its patois and preoccupations are very much in line with our troubled 2020s. That’s not a bad thing per se, nor are the film’s critique of predatory capitalism and its stabs at the deranged tech geniuses we have anointed as our new messiahs. But the way Mickey 17 peddles such attacks feels almost pedestrian, if not outright manipulative. 

Based on Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, Bong’s latest is also his first as a solo writer, but shares the same proclivity for over-exposition as Snowpiercer, arguably its closest cousin in terms of locale––shot by Darius Khondji as a wintry, snowcapped land, Niflheim isn’t all that different from the ice-age landscape Chris Evans traversed aboard a train––and basic plot mechanics. Stripped to its barest bones, Mickey 17 also charts a popular uprising against the powers that be. But that’s a lot of stripping to go through, as the film offers a cornucopia of ideas, conspiracies, and subplots. Tellingly, Bong’s most blatant twist to the source text lies in the title: asked about it on the eve of the film’s Berlinale premiere, he jokingly quipped that seven “was not enough”; if dying is your job, then “it should be like routine.” The employee-martyr in question is Pattinson’s Mickey Barnes, a small-time entrepreneur who, hunted by a bloodthirsty loan shark, enrolls for the most merciless of all tasks aboard Ruffalo’s spacecraft, a giant vessel where the elite get to lounge in lush rooms bedecked with Persian rugs and crystals while workers live in spartanly furnished cells surviving on food whose exact provenance isn’t quite clear. And maybe that’s for the best. (The socioeconomic distinctions articulated through Fiona Crombie’s production design aren’t all that different from Snowpiercer’s, and old Bong motifs abound: class warfare, resource scarcity, revolting food…)

Mickey is an “expendable,” which is to say he can be killed and “printed” back to life in 20 hours, give or take, while his memory is safely stored in a receptacle that’s part hard drive, part literal brick. Again: such anachronistic amalgam is something Bong already toyed with in Snowpiercer. If that film’s steampunk tech invoked Brazil, there are moments here when the wire-infested masks Mickey wears in the spaceship’s labs brought me back to La Jetée. That’s because Mickey 17 teems with real-world references as much as nods to sci-fi classics: Gilliam, Marker, even a Wilhelm Scream thrown in for good measure. 

Yet the film’s most exciting ideas––its concerns with the ethics behind the expendables, the psychopaths behind those experiments, the “meaning and terror of finality,” in Marshall’s ominous words––are curiously shrugged off as things that are either too difficult to comprehend or too obvious to dwell on. (“It’s some crazy technology man; let’s just say it’s advanced,” Pattinson’s voiceover claims of the stupefying device churning out doppelgängers; “ethical fights and religious blah blah” is the film’s way of addressing the pandemonium that presumably ensued such horrifying invention.)

Such hasty treatment is all the more surprising in a film where every new twist and epiphany begets its own exposition-heavy backstory, as when something goes terribly wrong and Mickey is left to confront another version of himself (Mickey18) erroneously printed out under the assumption that Mickey17 had died somewhere on Niflheim. (They’re not the first “multiples”, but then why is Mickey the only expandable in a mission that Marshall insists on pegging as humanity’s greatest adventure?)

Bong just isn’t interested in teasing out those details as he is in astroturfing this story into a very 21st-century parable of undesirables, deranged plutocrats, and colonialism. Which is basically what Mickey 17 swells into as soon as mankind encounters Niflheim’s indigenous fauna––think giant, furry roly-polys armed with tentacles and tails. Sound familiar? Like Okja, Mickey 17 ends up pitting an almost cartoonish embodiment of evil against a monstrous Other that slowly takes on a more benign aura. To be clear: I’m not suggesting the “creepers,” as Marshall calls them, are anywhere near as adorable as a certain oversized pig. But the fact remains that Mickey 17’s good-vs-evil scaffolding is just as reductive and unimaginative. 

Maybe the one eye-opening analogy here isn’t one between Okja and the creepers, but between Okja and Mickey himself. Like that enormous creature, Mickey is routinely humiliated, tortured, and abused by a ruling class for which he is, to borrow from Marshall again, nothing more than “meat matrix.” The ship’s commander-in-chief is hellbent on destroying the “aliens” (sic); Mickey and a tiny gaggle of good-hearted colonizers (including love interest Nasha, played by Naomi Ackie) would rather coexist and learn from them. The tone remains sardonic throughout, another departure for a director who can so deftly dance between different moods. On second thought, however, that too feels in line with the film’s design. 

Like Okja, Mickey 17 works to chastise all the things we despise and make us feel good about ourselves in the process. Maybe that’s why that Trump riff felt so conspicuous. A few weeks back, at a press conference in Seoul, Bong referenced the growth of AI while explaining his approach to the script. “How can we outsmart AI? I want to become a writer who writes one screenplay a year that AI could never replicate.” If his filmography is anything to go by, he’s long been capable of that. But with Mickey 17 he’s crafted something that’s oddly inert: a story all too eager to tell us where our allegiances should lie. 

Mickey 17 screened at the 2025 Berlinale and opens on March 7.