End-Times Comic Science Fiction

Frann Michel

Mickey 17
Written and directed by Bong Joon Ho;
produced by Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner,
Bong Joon Ho, Dooho Choi; distributed by Warner Brothers; 2025

BONG JOON HO’S Parasite (2019) was the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. That’s a hard act to follow, and his next film, Mickey 17 (2025) has found a tepid reception from critics. But it’s a sprawling, gorgeous, mostly comic tale of worker exploitation and collective resistance for the age of end times fascism.

Mickey 17 adapts the 2022 science-fiction novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton. Mickey (played by Robert Pattinson) is an “Expendable” on a mission to colonize the icy planet Niflheim. As an Expendable, he does the most dangerous and miserable jobs, including those he is not expected to survive, like serving as a test subject for exposure to cosmic radiation or alien viruses.

Mickey’s consciousness has been copied and saved to a computer brick (played by a literal brick), and his body is replicated every time he dies in the course of his work (seven times in the novel, 17 in the film).

Both novel and film interrogate this notion of uploading a mind. Familiar in recent science fiction series like Black Mirror (2011) or Altered Carbon (2018-2020, from a 2002 novel), this fantasy of digital immortality is embraced as a real possibility by some of the transhumanists whose wealth and current political power give their conceits a disturbing weight.

Both novel and film clarify that digital immortality is no such thing: a copy of you is not you. When Mickey7 or 17 is left for dead, a new iteration is decanted or printed out, and, as Mickey7 narrates in Ashton’s novel:

“Up until now, every time I went down I could at least halfway believe the crap my handlers were feeding me about my own immortality. I knew that a few hours after Mickey3 died, Mickey4 would come out of the tank, and I could imagine that it would just be me both times, closing my eyes and then opening them. If I die now, though, there won’t be another me coming out of the tank. The other me is already here, and despite all appearances, Eight is most definitely not a continuation of me.”

(A similar point is also made quite poign­antly in Jennifer Phang and Jaqueline Kim’s excellent but underviewed 2015 film Advantageous, which attends more fully to the differentially racialized and gendered dimensions of worker expendability.)

“Broligarchy” Fantasies

Likewise, while outer space has long provided a flexible setting for stories about life on earth — as with Star Trek’s “Final Frontier” or Star Wars’ riff on the US/Galactic Empire — Mickey 17 invites us also to consider what’s entailed in the prospect of leaving earth behind. In a flashback to crowds on earth applying to join the colony ship, a news reporter says, “It’s clear that anti-migrationists are talking to a brick wall when they insist on fixing up the Earth instead of risking lives by migrating to another planet.”

The film thus resonates not just with capitalism’s longstanding disregard for the lives of workers, and not just with transhumanist delusions of leaving behind human mortality, but also with the reigning tech broligarchy’s fantasies of leaving behind the messy planet they increasingly treat as disposable.

Bong’s film is perhaps appropriately messy itself. A hodgepodge of tones and topics, rife with plot holes and logical inconsistencies, it hangs together by its strong performances, visual aplomb, and simmering rage at a multiplicity of deserving targets.

The colonizing mission is funded by a “religious organization and corporation,” led by a cross between televangelists and Trump. Part fascist, part cult leader, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) is a buffoonish failed politician whose fanatical followers wear red baseball caps. He seeks to make Niflheim “a pure white planet full of superior people,” without all the “muddy people” of earth. (One of the logic puzzles then might be why the crew of colonizers includes people of color, but one could wonder that about the MAGA movement.)

Marshall’s wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) sports fingernails that rival Tammy Faye Bakker’s eyelashes in extravagance, and concocts sauce recipes that involve literally consuming the local population — whose intelligent sentience of course is denied by the Marshalls, but whose wit and generosity clearly exceed that of several of the human characters.

As Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor point out in their April Guardian essay summarizing the rise of end-times fascism, climate change and Covid-19 have been major drivers of the current acceleration. Mickey 17 references both problems. In a flashback to earth, blasé reactions to a sudden, giant sandstorm index the prevalent climate chaos. Later, one of the Mickeys dies from experiments during which we see a computer screen filled with a large coronavirus image.

Other strands of attack involve drug trafficking, violence against houseless people, the economic precarity that drives people to migrate off earth, and vacuous and deceptive public relations media, including the degrading spectacle of one worker assigned to walk around in a pigeon suit.

Specter of Expendability

But it’s the expendability of workers that Bong’s adaptation leans into — as reflected in the increase in killings from seven to 17. Both book and movie open with Mickey’s abandonment to death, rationalized by the expectation he will be rebooted.

In flashback, we see that at least one of Mickey 17’s predecessors has been dropped, still alive, into the furnace for recycling.

Mickey’s treatment as a thing rather than a person reflects the bare life of labor. Excluded from the benefits workers have been fighting for over generations, Mickey explains that while we might think all these deaths would make him rich from life insurance, Expendables are of course uninsurable and, he notes, without workers’ comp, pension benefits or unions.

Where Ashton’s Mickeys come out of a tank, Bong’s are “printed” in something that resembles an MRI machine, emphasizing the process as mechanical. Often the printer seems to jam, and Mickey’s body slides out in irregular jerks. Attendants sometimes forget to position the [paper tray] gurney on which he should land.

In counterpoint to the broad farce puncturing fascist pomposity, the gags around Mickey’s many deaths make for a slightly queasy humor, precisely because we do see him, our protagonist and narrator, as a person, not a thing. His repeated suffering is a painfully funny take on the problem of social murder, individualized in its representation through the many Mickeys.

“Social murder” was Friedrich Engels’ notable term for the ways that the ordinary business of capitalism leads to the premature death of the exploited and oppressed. The term has seen a resurgence in the 21st century, especially since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, with capital’s demand that first “essential workers,” and then everyone else, continue laboring in pestilential environs.

Mainstream narratives do tend to individualize collective issues, just as science fiction often literalizes figurative relations, and Bong’s works share these moves.

In The Host (2006), the results of U.S. toxic dumping in Korea manifest as a giant monster. In Snowpiercer (2013), the possible continuation of the human species is figured in the survival of two children. In Mickey 17, we see the phenomenon of social murder through the repeated killing of Mickey.

But we also see a fable of resistance and solidarity. As Marshall declares a state of emergency and war, taking “sole command and control,” other colonists begin documenting the Marshalls’ abuses. Rather than pursue the fascist leader’s genocidal campaign of “Total Extermination” against the indigenous inhabitants, other settlers support Mickey by refusing Marshall’s orders.

In the epilogue set six months after the climactic events, new figures have been elected to the Committee now running the colony, and the Expendable program is officially ended.

There’s probably too much going on in Mickey 17, but so there is beyond it. As comic science fiction, it doesn’t pretend to a realistic portrait of resisting capitalism, colonialism or fascism. The film is an extravagant extrapolation from the miseries of the present, and a chance to laugh at the delusions of end-times fascism.

July-August 2025, ATC 237