Perhaps I got a little too excited when the trailer dropped for Mickey 17, the first film from acclaimed South Korean director Bong Joon Ho since his landmark Best Picture win in 2019. But can you blame me? Ho himself set expectations high.
Hyper-stylized, perfectly cast, with an expertly suspenseful pacing that’s rarely been seen since Hitchcock, Parasite fully deserved to become the first foreign film to take home the Oscars’ top prize. Ho spent six years crafting a follow-up, so Mickey 17, a return to his sci-fi roots, was poised to deliver something just as inventive.
But despite all its technical greatness, Parasite was not all that thematically complex. At its core, the film is a moral tale of the haves vs. the have-nots, one that’s been made a million unwatchable times by lesser directors. It worked in the iniquitous sprawl of Seoul, but the stakes are so much higher in the vast emptiness of outer space. Mickey 17 projects all of our most shallow, materialist impulses into the realm least hospitable for it—and us—to survive. The result is a film that prioritizes stale didacticism over genuine storytelling, but in its fumble, shows us precisely the crooked path to avoid on our way to the future.
We first meet Mickey (Robert Pattinson) as he’s about to die. Injured, his comrade abandons him on a barren ice planet, left for alien food. A flashback reveals he’s part of an “Expendables” program, in which humans willingly sign up to have their brains uploaded to a backup server, so that each time they die, they’re simply “reprinted” as a biologically identical copy of themselves. With this amazing new technology, unscrupulous megalomaniacs find a way to capitalize.
Due to moral qualms, we’re told Expendable research is only legal off-planet, an easy technological feat in this not-too-distant future. Yet far from a willing participant, Mickey only signed up in a desperate attempt to escape debt on Earth. He knew life as an Expendable would be rough, but couldn’t predict the gruesome extent to which he’d become a human science experiment for a failed Trump-like politician (Mark Ruffalo in a spray tan) and his red-hatted followers in their mission to colonize a new planet with a genetically pure (“white”) race.
My guess: if and when Expendables technology becomes feasible, we’ll distract from the difficult moral questions with endless debate over “representation” in the Multiples community.
Sometimes, it’s nerve gas, testing a weapon to use against potential alien combatants. Other times, it’s pure dumb luck, chopped up by space debris on a mission outside the ship. When they land on the new planet, Mickey is the first to disembark; who better to check for deadly pathogens? Several deaths later, the scientists on board find a vaccine. For an expendable life, he’s an indispensable part of the crew, used to save worthier lives while never earning their respect. This goes on and on—until clone #17 accidentally survives.
In short, Mickey fled to space to escape the ravages of capitalism, only to find himself even deeper in its gruesomely exploitative machinations. While the politician lives large in gilded quarters, with real food and a done-up, Slavic wife to feed his comically large ego, the crew scrimps by on paste-like rations, cramped quarters, and a high-tech social credit system that rations resources to keep them all in line. Far from Parasite’s subtlety, Mickey 17 offers only ham-handed metaphor, and a hyper-partisan one at that. Each brutal death reads like an increasingly hysterical MSNBC chyron: this is what wealthy right-wingers are going to do to you next.
Obviously, this is a horrible dystopian future; Expendables are part of a bad system, the people who justify it are worse. Even in our age of deep division, MAGA and Antifa can probably both agree. So the moral debate here is banal, an invented controversy to serve an agenda. The sad irony is that Ho’s premise really does set up some fascinating moral questions. Unfortunately, those aren’t the ones he chooses to explore.
When clone 17 survives, unbeknownst to the rest of the crew, they print out #18—a “Multiples” violation, and a capital crime in the future. Why are Multiples illegal?
You might think it’s because the human soul is unique and sacred, so that a duplicate consciousness would defy divine creation and tamper with God’s design. Or perhaps from a secular view, it simply commoditizes human life and experiences. There’s even the sociopolitical argument that Multiples could undermine property rights and the legal system, overwhelm the welfare state, dilute voting systems, and destroy modern democracy entirely. What about Multiple terrorists and dictators, and the threat to global security? Even the Marxist view on (literally) reproducing inequalities would be more interesting.
Yet the explanation given is that one autistic tech bro went on an American Psycho-style rampage, and thus, the world decided to ban Multiples outright. If the two Mickeys are caught, they’ll be permanently “deleted,” so they learn to work together against a common enemy and an unjust system with the help of a noble indigenous alien population. I won’t spoil the ending, but you know where it’s going. Eye roll.
Despite not liking the film, I left almost impressed: for a foreign director to put his finger on the pulse of American bumper sticker liberalism is no easy feat. Yet we’re not actually all that far out from this dystopian future, and the film is a reminder to look beyond the current zeitgeist.
The average person can 3D print just about anything these days, although still not a human being. But scientists did just clone a direwolf, splicing ancient DNA to resurrect a species that’s been extinct for over 10,000 years. Meanwhile, as NASA atrophies, privatized space flight is fast becoming the norm, and plans for a manned mission to Mars are well under way (SpaceX estimates 2029). Whole industries are even devoted to intergalactic colonization. And on the consciousness front? We’re already grappling with the ethical implications of AI, whether it can work, reason, and even love as we do. Will the AI soon be more human than humans, and if so, what then?
If we look to the future with the same narrow-mindedness as the film, we’re not going to get far. Too often, the film’s shallow neuroses are reflected in real-world institutions: corporate boards, research and development, bureaucracies, and government. When kids fall into depression, anxiety, and self-destructive behavior, we blame social media and technology itself, rather than the broader culture that feeds the algorithms. In response, governments crack down on tech platforms over “hate,” “harm,” and “misinformation” rather than the social cleavages that drive alienation in the first place. My guess: if and when Expendables technology becomes feasible, we’ll distract from the difficult moral questions with endless debate over “representation” in the Multiples community.
At the end of the universe, technologically triumphant, we’re still left with these questions: what does it mean for humanity if we’re not alone, or perhaps worse, if we are?
Yet I can think of no place less suited for this than outer space—a realm in which, despite humanity’s great progress, our knowledge has only just scratched the surface. On Earth, we take for granted a baseline stability, harmony, and material provision. We can haggle performatively over haves and have-nots, knowing that we all have enough to get by, at least by historical standards. We can invent faux moral struggles to amuse ourselves, all while deflecting from the real culprits, never seriously grappling with anything that might disturb our comfort. Yet it’s a sign of man’s great hubris to think that these petty squabbles and grievances—these luxury beliefs—hold any significance outside our own little world.
The future is coming, and it will look radically different from the past and present. We likely will have manned off-planet exploration in the future, perhaps in our lifetimes. And we actually will have to grapple with the difficult moral questions the film elides as technological innovation pours over the current horizon. But success, on both technological and moral fronts, is only possible if we take a sober look at the world as it is.
It remains to be seen if we can muster the civilizational strength to admit the beliefs that make us feel morally good and physically safe aren’t all that important. Doing so would require a hard look inwards, both individually and collectively, to answer some uncomfortable questions. Does it really matter that some people achieve, succeed, or earn more than others? Is there really a moral distinction between winner and loser, victim and oppressor, haves and have-nots? Must we vanquish every foe—whether it be poverty, abuse, exploitation, or cultural backwardness, foreign and domestic—or is suffering a fact of life, all relative, and relatively minor? Are absolute safety, comfort, and equality worthy goals—or has all the “progress” since the last time we put a man on the moon been merely an illusion?
Ultimately, it’s not a question of whether man’s quest for progress is meaningless, but whether “progress” as we understand it is a distraction from a much greater destiny.
This is a far cry from nihilism, or a claim that the human condition is meaningless in the infinite reaches of space. In fact, it’s just the opposite. It is man’s mortality that gives his quest meaning: his willingness to reject comfort and embrace suffering, to dedicate his life, and perhaps even lose it, to bring humanity across a new horizon both physically and in the new moral questions his discoveries will raise. At the end of the universe, technologically triumphant, we’re still left with these questions: what does it mean for humanity if we’re not alone, or perhaps worse, if we are? Have we fulfilled our destiny to overcome the final frontier, or, in a Babel-like travesty, have we fled our ordained plan altogether?
Answering these questions, when they arise, will take more clarity than perhaps has ever been required in human history. Yet the answers only matter precisely because we are human.
The delusions of the film are clear: just as materialism wasn’t the primary motivator of the explorers who charted the New World, it won’t drive the explorers blazing their way to Mars and beyond. The idea of an Expendable program is wrong because it devalues not only human life, but human achievement and destiny in the process; there’s little meaning to an adventure that has no risk, no faith required for an immortal destiny already known. If one can just be infinitely reborn, there are no stakes to the human condition at all; there is no humanity. Yet in the real world, when every minute calculation is the difference between life and death, when there’s so much unknown that the mind of a man cut off from humanity clings to his few finite knowns millions of miles from Earth, there is no room for the comfort of delusion.
`Art ought to engage with the terrifying spectre of this future, critique it, for better or worse. The artist’s strength lies in his ability to reveal deeper truths about the world around him. Parasite succeeded because it did just that, examining the world as it is, while Mickey 17 simply constructed a world it loves to hate. But as the future comes barrelling towards us, we’ll need more than just competent, clear-headed technologists. We need equally competent artists to help us make sense of it all.
