Mickey 17

Robert Pattinson, a.k.a. Mickey 17, lies at the bottom of an ice crevice. Blood pools beneath him. He cannot move. A shout echoes from above. A person waves. It’s Steven Yeun. He repels down. “Oh, thank goodness,” he says. “Your flamethrower wasn’t damaged. These are expensive, you know.” He fastens it to his back and prepares to climb back up. Then he hesitates and kneels down next to our hero.

“Hey Mickey,” he says, his grin widening, “what is it like to die?”

It is sometime in the future. Mankind has perfected the science of cloning. Humans who die can be brought back to life with their prior memories intact. The practice is outlawed on Earth. The creator of this technology used it create multiple versions of himself as an alibi to cover up his crimes as a serial killer. That seems like a lot of effort to get away with murder, but never mind. Why the rest of humanity would forgo any the chance at immortality is never adequately explained.

The hero, Mickey, is played by Pattison as a mumbling halfwit. He signs up to join a corporate-run expedition to colonize another planet. He doesn’t dream of being a pioneer. He’s just looking to escape his debt to a loan shark. There are thousands of other applicants. To stand out, Mickey signs on to be an “expendable.”

The recruiting agent stares at him. “Did you read all the fine print?” Mickey blinks half-glazed eyes. “…uhm. Yeah?”

See, duplicating people is illegal on Earth, but acceptable once you get to international waters—err, I mean, outer space. The only restriction is that if you discover multiples of the same person, they must be destroyed on sight and the memory data purged.

As the only expendable on the crew, Mickey is assigned all the worst jobs. He dies a lot. I think it is meant to be funny, but there’s no comic timing or payoff. A swinging antenna lops off one of his arms. “Oh man, did you see that?” a voice on the radio howls. A crew member notices Mickey still breathing inside his body bag. “He’s still alive!” Another man shrugs. “Not for long.” He tosses him into the incinerator. Sometimes, the science team forgets to pay attention while Mickey’s new body slides out of the printer. In one scene, he just plops out headfirst on the floor while people go about their business. Whoops. Ho ho ho.

I imagine this is supposed to endear us to Mickey and his plight. It’s a shame, then, that he’s insufferable. Pattison plays him as pathetic sad sack who narrates the proceedings in a nasally whine. There’s never any attempt to give him a drive or a goal. He exists to suffer abuse at the hands of the supporting cast. A young security officer falls in love with him, presumably because he looks like Robert Pattinson.

Every other character is an aggressively unpleasant caricature. There is nothing funny about them, because we do not believe them as characters. There is no kernel of truth or understanding or relatability to make the humor ring with truth. Instead, they wobble about, shouting and gesticulating in a constant stream of idiocy that is intended to be a satire, but of what, I couldn’t say.

Mickey is eventually left for dead on this new planet but is saved by the enormous potato bugs that inhabit it. When he returns to the ship, he discovers they have already printed another Mickey. Number 18 is smarter and more aggressive for reasons that are never explained. At first, they fight, then they conspire to stay alive.

The villains are Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and Ylfa (Toni Collette). Marshall is a former politician and secretly has some sort of vague eugenics scheme for the new world. His wife, Ylfa, is obsessed with sauce. They don’t so much chew the scenery as they devour entire sets. Ruffalo seems to be channeling some sort of Donald Trump character, but it’s hard to fathom what director Boon Jung Ho is trying to say.

I guess this is all supposed to be a scathing indictment of late-stage capitalism and the plight of the working class. Mickey is the earnest employee who gets chewed up by an uncaring system. If that’s the metaphor, it’s muddled by the 47 other ideas the director crams in and seemingly forgets about, often within the same scene. The film exists in such a heightened state of reality that you might only be able to approach it if you are high to begin with.

It’s fueled by the delusion that it has something to say, but what, and to who, I know not.

Was there anything I liked in this movie? I think the creature effects were nice. The “Creepers” manage to be disgusting and cute in equal measure. That’s an accomplishment. Well done, CGI department.

Everything else, I hated. After enduring two hours and 17 minutes of this farce, I, too, wanted to know what it would be like to die. And the quickest way to bring it about.