Everything is romantic for Mickey 17 (2025)

by Adelaide Song on 2025-03-10.
Tags: film

Spoilers follow.

We don’t see the central image of Mickey 17 until the final minutes of the film’s third act. The titular photocopied man, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is dying inside a fume hood, used as a lab rat for a bioweapon later to be used on an unsuspecting alien population. As the scientists responsible gather for a press op off-screen, his partner, Nasha (Naomi Ackie) cradles him close, holding his hand as lesions begin to appear across his body. Despite the hazmat suit between them, the moment is so powerfully intimate it threatens to burn a hole in the projection screen.

This is not the movie I would have expected from the initial pitch of “Bong Joon-ho sci-fi movie starring Robert Pattinson.” A premise as inherently dark as disposable clones seems like it should be ripe for pitch-black satire in Bong’s hands, especially given he was drawn to Pattinson by films like the famously cheerful… Good Time (2017.)¹

Instead, he delivers a hopelessly earnest and romantic rom-com that just so happens to look sci-fi from the right angle. To be clear, there’s no disappointment in that statement; unless the rest of the year is wall-to-wall bangers, this is going to be be one of my favourite films released in 2025, if not outright my favourite. I just didn’t expect heaven to be Chinese, as it were.

Let’s get what we did expect out of the way. Pattinson was genetically engineered for this role. I fully understand why people are calling for early shots on a Best Actor nom. Whether The Batman or The Lighthouse, Pattinson’s best roles are built around his magnetic mix of awkward and charm, and that’s leveraged to the fullest as the titular Mickey 17. The decision to play his oddball nature as “anxious airhead” is magical: after childhood friend and perennial grifter Timo (Steven Yeun) leaves him for dead in the movie’s inciting incident, the worst insult he can muster is “jerk”, as if he stepped off the page of an Archie comic. His demented 20s newsboy “extry extry”-ass accent really completes the look.

This could easily end up being flat or grating in less talented hands, but the interplay between his innocent nature and the hell of his situation remains compelling throughout. Part of his down-on-his-luck act is clearly minimizing what he’s gone through for his own sanity; 17 is a complete doormat in even life-or-death situations, but one of the few things that genuinely gets his hackles up is being asked “what’s it like to die.” It turns out that if you’ve been used as a test dummy (in at least one case, literally used as a test dummy) for some of the worst deaths humanity has to offer, it fucking sucks. In that light much of his absent-mindedness and free-floating attitude reads as his sense of self being slowly sanded into nothing. His brain might actually be actively corrupting courtesy of the neglectful overseers running the print/scan samsara he’s trapped in.

By contrast, Mickey 18 seems almost too aware of the injustice around him. After the inventor of human printing was found using his own technology to carry out perfect murders, the existence of multiple copies of a single mind-state is a crime punishable by wiping all their incarnations—including their backup—from the face of the earth. When the two Mickeys find they’ve ended up in this lethal dilemma, 17’s first instinct is to treat it as an opportunity to split their punishing shifts. 18’s response is much less conciliatory: he’s just been born and he’s going to kill anyone who threatens that fact.

17 thinks his new clone is completely unlike all the Mickeys that came before, but it’s hard to imagine any reasonable person wouldn’t crack under the strain of what he experienced. The dynamic that they settle into after their initial confrontation has 18 act as a kind of protective older sibling to 17. In one of the film’s highlight sequences, 17 attends a dinner with the colony’s repugnant rulers, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette.) As you’d expect from the profoundly laissez-faire mad scientists on board, the steak he’s served turns out to be laced with experimental growth hormones that put him into anaphylactic shock. The medical team’s attempts to dose him with equally experimental painkillers do not go well. It takes the intervention of sympathetic space cadet Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei) to narrowly avert Marshall blowing 17’s brains out all over the carpet, and the only thing 17 can think to say as he departs is “Thank you for dinner.”

When 17 relays the news to 18, 18 briefly looks like he’s about to kill him again, before turning his wrath into an immediate attempt on Marshall’s life. It’s both cathartic and heartbreaking to have one Mickey in the exact same headspace as the audience, while the other one is so downtrodden he can’t conceive why someone would react that way. From the jump it’s all too inevitable that 18 will sacrifice himself for 17’s sake; he’s just too angry at the world not to, too ready to destroy himself if it means taking everyone else with him. It is a tremendous credit to Pattinson that it doesn’t hurt any less when it happens.

As good as Pattinson’s dynamic with himself is, any discussion of the movie would be woefully incomplete without talking about Nasha, whose relationship with Mickey is undeniably the actual foundation of the movie. Without Ackie this movie would be ordinary or worse. With her presence, Mickey 17 boasts one of the most moving and resonant on-screen relationships I’ve ever seen.

What’s most impressive to me is the sheer economy with which the film paints their relationship. We don’t actually spend that much screentime on how these two got together, but we also don’t need to. Their charmingly Disney-original meet cute in the ship’s mess hall is immediately followed by their first hookup in a sequence that’s way too hot for its M-rating. Watching Mickey lean his head against Nasha’s inner thighs broke several of my mutuals’ brains², to say nothing of the way he looks up at her while tightening her belts. (This whole thing is intercut with Marshall’s announcement that he’s banning sex to conserve calories.)

By contrast to the film’s otherwise hyper-saturated palate of colorful characters, Nasha’s presence as an adult in the room stops it from flying fully off the rails. While many of the secondary characters are painted with broad strokes—Ruffalo in particular is doing a borderline SNL Trump impression—Ackie is afforded the space and time to be far more nuanced in her performance, and she grabs the opportunity and runs with it. It would be all too easy to play “a threesome with two clones of your boyfriend while you’re on space whippets” for pure laughs. The resulting scene isn’t above the inherent comedy of the premise, but that’s because I would lose my shit if I woke up one day and found out my girlfriend had cloned herself. Ackie takes the challenge of juggling the complex mix of drunk lust, ouright shock—and flaring jealousy, courtesy of Kai asking to split the Mickies like a Twix—then somehow manages to run this hellish gamut with flying colors.

While I do love what time we get with Nasha, it’s so good that it really makes me wish more of the movie was devoted to it. I could watch an entire TV show of the relationship between her and the Mickeys 1 through 16; while I fully believe 17 when he tells us that Nasha’s loved all the Mickeys equally, it’s still something I would have adored seeing play out on-screen. The closest we get is the scene I mentioned in this review’s opening, and it’s no less poignant for how short and straightforward it is.

Granted, the movie does still have to balance all the different directions it pulls in, and it does so with admirable finesse. I would still be disappointed if it had dropped its sci-fi trappings altogether, or lost its tight pace trying to fit everything in. At the end of the day, though, Bong’s still clear about where this film’s heart lies. Through the lens of pure spec-fic, the ending is just a little too neat, a little too pat; for the most earnest romance film I’ve seen in years, it’s the ride into the sunset its heroes deserve.