Review of Mickey 17, directed by Bong Joon-ho

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

Once upon a time I used to go the movies every week, as I had an AMC A List subscription. For my non-Americans out there reading this, this means that a local movie theater chain here in the States has a subscription where if you pay like $28 a month, you can watch up to four movies a week there. I ended up losing my car in April 2024, which is when I stopped going as often.

Mickey 17 is one of the movies that I would have definitely watched if I still had my movie theater subscription. I’m such a big fan of Bong Joon-ho’s work. I knew about him years before Parasite came out, as I’ve been in the Korean cinema whole and fanbase for about a decade now (at the time of writing this in the summer of 2025), but the cherry on top of my cake in college was when I got to meet him and Song Kang-ho at IFC Center’s screening of Parasite.

Anyways, I didn’t have A List when Mickey 17 came out, nor a car, so when no one wanted to see it, I ended up just patiently waiting until my local library branch had a DVD copy. I was one of the first requests to put that in, so as soon as they got it, I had it in my hands.

Let’s get into the review!

To escape loans, Mickey allows himself to be a part of a science experiment where he’s killed and cloned over and over again.

This movie is set in 2050, when a young Mickey Barnes and his best buddy Timo decide to flee a loan shark and join an exclusive space program. The goal of the program is to colonize a planet called Niflheim, but while Timo is given a position as a pilot, Mickey is given something much less desirable: he is an expendable.

He is trained with gruel and not treated the best, and his main purpose is he’s going to be sent out to do tasks that will most likely end with him getting killed. And every time he does get killed doing the task, a clone of him with the same memories is created in the lab.

Even though he’s brutally dying in a painful manner and experimented on in the lab, Mickey finds love with a security agent on the ship called Nasha. The years pass by and the ship eventually reaches Niflheim, and Mickey is sent out to be a guinea pig to find out what diseases will kill people. They do end up finding and creating a vaccine, and Mickey, on his seventeenth clone, is sent out to kidnap a local creatured called a Creeper.

He falls into a fissure doing so, but Timo leaves him to do in the pit. The Creepers help him out and make a pile that lets him get out of the hole, implying they’re actually very nice creatures. He goes back to the ship but learns they thought he died, so they made a Mickey 18 that’s quite aggressive. Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 realize that if they’re caught, they’re going to be killed off, so they decide to work together.

Somewhere along the way they see Timo selling fuel as a form of a drug, and Mickey 18 decides he’s going to kill their former buddy. They almost succeed in doing so, but then Nasha shows up and takes Mickey 18 away. Mickey 17 is then taken to dinner with the head of the ship and his wife, Marshall and Ylfa, but he’s fed something that’s actually an experiment.

He has a violent reaction on the ground and Marshall gets ready to kill him, but then Kai, another security agent, saves him. It’s right after that Nasha learns there are two Mickeys, but then Kai finds out and is willing to sell them out for her own clout. A ceremony is being held where they took a rock from the planet, and while Mickey 18 prepares to gun down Marshall, two baby Creepers roll out of the rock.

The people start panicking and one of the Creepers is shot, and Nasha prevents Mickey 18 from gunning down Marshall. Mickey 17 is then caught, allowing people to realize there is a double on the ship. All three of them are arrested, but there are bigger problems: the Creepers are outside and want their babies back. Mickey 17 tells Nasha the Creepers are actually pretty sweet beings and she accepts that fact, but then Timo shows up.

Turns out Timo is going to kill Mickey 17 on behalf of the loan shark, and Nasha stops Timo. Security rounds them up and brings them to Marshall, who apparently wants to annihilate all of the Creepers. He destroys all of Mickey’s backups to make sure he never regenerates, then sends him outside with the urging of his wife to deal with the Creepers and find their tails to cook.

They’re fitted into suicide vests basically, with bombs inside of them, and are sent outside to the Creepers. They find their queen and warn her, with a translation device, what’s going to happen. The mother wants the baby back and a sacrifice of a human for her dead child. Nasha frees the surviving child, and while chaos breaks out with the Creepers and humans, Mickey 18 takes Marshall and himself out with the suicide vest so there’s a sacrifice.

This leads to peace with the Creepers, and Ylfa, after being apprehended, kills herself. Timo kills the loan shark after he comes after him, and Nasha becomes the leader of the spaceship. Mickey 17, now just Mickey Barnes, decides to destroy the cloning device and never put anyone through that again.

Overall Thoughts

While this is an interesting movie with some compelling themes about colonialism and humanity, especially when it comes to the ethics of cloning someone just to basically torture them, I wasn’t the biggest fan of this movie. It feels like something I have seen before, even though the actors do a great job with the material.

I think something I’ve noticed, having seen almost all of Bong’s filmography at this point, is that when he goes towards Hollywood-eseque themes that he loses something special in his work for me. I also think Parasite is such a uniquely Korean story, but it’s also a departure in some ways in how it focuses more on a global perspective.

It’s Bong’s American movies though that seem to follow very specific themes and archetypes that I don’t find unique because he uses them often. They’re still good movies—I just think that his Korean movies set in Korea are better.

All of this is to say: definitely watch this if you’re interested. It’s a solid movie, but it’s not going to live up as one of Bong’s best films, that’s for sure. Don’t let an Internet stranger discourage you though—taste is incredibly subjective, so what I might not be like could be your favorite movie. Neither of us are wrong!

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