Mickey 17

Mar 24, 2025

Saw this one at a local cinema.

Spoilers!

I’m rewatch-pilled now. I saw Ran twice in two days. Did the same with Mickey 17. You catch so many details, develop an appreciation even for a film you weren’t initially so thrilled about.

Between this and Severance, the problem of personal identity is in the zeitgeist. The people demand to know: is there such a thing as a soul that contains our personality, or can personhood be reduced to observable components? Mickey 17, to my delight, has an opinion about this. Yes, says Bong Joon Ho, there is a soul. Immortal soul: body dies, it lives on, finds its body again. Not just memories: two prints of the same matter, same memories, but different: the second one is not ensouled. Old body still kicking around, body and soul bound together, no free soul to inhabit the new body. So God gives each human one soul, only one, eternal monad. Eternal life is Christian, but clones are a no-no.

Does it shatter my theory to admit it is the bad guy who declares this?

Mickey 18, without a soul, is a psychopath. Consider the only other multiples in the film, the mad scientist/serial killer, an echo with Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers.

Perhaps another set of multiples: Kenneth and Ylfa Marshall, who maybe kept illegal “backups” using the printing technology. To be honest, I was confused by that scene at the end.

Mickey 18 may not have a soul. Is he human? As long as he fears death—the survival instinct is the criterion of life. Again, it is the bad guy who says this.

Does the soul have memory? I’ve long felt that the soul is, to analogize, to human memory as RAM is to disk. The data is nothing if you don’t have a running process containing the computation. (Hence, we will only crack human intelligence when we stop thinking in Von Neumann and start thinking in LISP, with continuations!)

Everyone wants to know what it’s like to die. The question is never answered. It’s the wrong question.

Kai and Jennifer are eager bug-killers, Starship Troopers. Also elements from Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, adapted here more as story template than as allusion. Mickey 17 thematically overlaps but little more. And, of course, the obvious similarities to Wall-E, Don’t Look Up, Prey (2017 video game), Avenue 5. What else?

Structurally fun for the first half. Nod at the classic, freeze-frame, “I bet you’re wondering how I ended up here,” extended flashback, catch us up to present. Comes back at the end. C.f. media with VO throughout, e.g. Wolf of Wall Street, Euphoria.

Good technique here, must steal. Examples:

  1. A nice mirror shot between Mickey waking up in the printer and waking up pulled by the mama creeper. Got to appreciate the little things like this, how skilled filmmakers take every opportunity—every shot, every movement—to strengthen the storytelling. Even if only to say: he is still alive.

  2. No need to portray the actual first conversation between Mickey and Nasha. We get it from the body language, gestures, music. I’d be hard-pressed to recount a specific exchange from my own life, especially conversations that feature flirtatious banter, speed and wit, short-lived in-jokes, impossible to convey. It is more intellectually honest to elide the details!

  3. Subtle thing in the exposition: Mickey signs up to be an Expendable, the clerk confirms he has read the paperwork (are you sure you want to sign up for this?). This could easily come before the audience knows the term Expendable. I wonder if it moved around in the edit. As it appears in the film, the point of this little scene is not that printing sucks (we know that already), but that Mickey is both desperate and stupid, vulnerable, might have regrets, as the VO emphasizes for those not paying attention.

  4. Permit yourself to create simple contrivances to move the plot forward. Ylfa needs to make that sauce right now! Or another little visual contrivance: put the Arrival-esque scientist behind Mickey while he speaks to the creeper, she’s underneath a decontamination spray that goes off, and rack focus for good measure, to draw attention to her, to ensure the audience knows she saw Mickey communicating with the alien/rightful native inhabitant.

Sex positions are a major plot point, but notice the futuristic iPad on which these animated drawings are made. We have no reason to believe the loser Mickey Barnes is an amateur animator. Must be a dream application: draw on a tablet with a stylus, building in animation without switching modes. Some kind of Bret Victor user interface utopia within this cyberpunk dystopia.

Cool trailer.

Ulaanbaatar mentioned?