‘Mickey 17’ Review: Bong Joon-ho is Back with One of the Best and Goofiest Robert Pattinson(s) Performances Ever [B] – Berlinale

“What’s it like, dying?”, is a question that marks the one thing humans will always find it impossible to communicate. The limits of our own knowability are also a thrust for endless curiosity, not only for moral philosophers and anyone who’s seen Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, but also for every single person at the Niflheim space colony – only one person can answer this query and that is Mickey (Robert Pattinson), whose job is to die. Repeatedly. This is the main conceit of Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s long-awaited follow up to the Oscar-winning Parasite and the film lives up to the hype. When the main character finds himself accidentally cloned, the real fun begins: two Robert Pattinsons (the 17th and 18th of the Mickeys, respectively) are better than one, right?

The film, adapted from Edward Ashton’s sci-fi novel “Mickey 7,” opens in medias res, as Pattinson’s character has fallen down in a deep cave. His pal, Timo (Steven Yeun) appears only to abandon him minutes later and to wish him “a nice death.” At this point, Mickey’s helpful voiceover introduces a flashback of 4 years ago when he and Timo fell into huge debt to a loan shark (by opening a place for French macarons) and the only way to escape his omnipresent gaze was to… leave the planet. Hyperboles like these make up a lot of the film’s dystopian humor and tie neatly into the main character’s occupation (or professional hazard, if you wish): being an “expendable.” He is a test subject for vaccines and the one sent out on dangerous missions in the name of progress; effectively, Mickey is the mission’s lab rat and every death of his brings new knowledge. Since his body gets reprinted in only 20 hours and his memory is stored in a brick-sized hard drive (for continuity purposes), his whole existence belongs to his employer as a smart metaphor for a kind of capitalist purgatory. 

There are two things that can break the vicious cycle of violence and exploitation: one of them is love, and the second one is revolution. Thankfully, Mickey 17 offers both. Love blooms between Mickey and Nasha (Naomi Ackie) from day one and the film is not afraid to make it obvious by abandoning its more stricter formal rules in favour of a slow-motion montage of the couple meeting, laughing, and having sex over a sentimental piano score. There are other genre twists that fit the off-beat tone of it all, but the coexistence of comedy, thriller, and melodrama is baked into the snappy dialogue; nobody is afraid to express themselves in this film, so naturally the central performances will be pleasantly over the top. Notably, Bong gifts us a Mickey 17 spin on that bed scene in Challengers in the hilariously strange (and hot) scene where Nasha finds herself between the two naked Mickeys: it’s the threesome we didn’t think we wanted, but the threesome we deserve.

Pattinson’s performance is surely inspiring, even when it verges on becoming gimmicky. To differentiate the two characters he plays—the timid ‘loser’ Mickey 17 and his cocky successor—he changed his accent for each one of them, and as he revealed during the film’s press conference, he based both on accents from Fargo. There will be people who will mock the accents (there always are), but this simple trick does make a difference, especially when it comes to humor. Pattinson is not known for his great comedic timing (e.g. Twilight or Cosmopolis), but it seems like he just hasn’t been given the opportunity to shine until now. It’s a performance that’s joyful to watch, so he must have the gift of making annoying characters a bit more endearing. Such a conclusion chimes well with the film’s softer core, which, much like it was in Okja, remains concealed for the most part.

In contrast with the tender love story, the villain here is frightfully realistic. Kenneth ‘The One and Only’ Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) is a plump, velvet-clad dictatorial man with a God-complex. Marshall has utopian dreams of a brave new world of purity he can rule over with his catty wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) by his side, but he also has a huge cult following that will surely get him there. Teams of scientists, mechanics, extensive security and surveillance play a part in a complex apparatus to feed his ego and fulfill the mission. Ruffalo has cranked the volume up on his Poor Things performance and is delightfully unhinged as Marshall: even Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon could learn a few things from him. Together with the ever-stellar Collette, these two strike the right balance in satirical representation that mocks without cheapening the villain.

Mickey 17 was already in pre-production when the original source novel, “Mickey 7” came out in 2022 and the author Edward Ashton describes the central spark for the book as “the idea of a crappy immortality.” It’s no surprise that Bong was attracted to a sci-fi plot which stretches our notions of ethics to the extreme and in multiple directions: the value of human life, dictatorial politics, colonialism, revolution, and animal rights are all important themes at stake. As a writer-director known for his expansive film worlds that become a playground for moral dilemmas and unlikely heroic journeys, Bong doesn’t disappoint. 

Grade: B

This review is from the 2025 Berlin Film Festival. Warner Bros will release Mickey 17 theatrically in the U.S. on March 7.

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Savina Petkova

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