The wait is over! One of the year’s most hotly anticipated releases is finally set to land this week, with the new sci-fi spectacular Mickey 17 arriving at Cineworld cinemas on 7 March.
The latest movie from Bong Joon-ho – who directed the Academy Award-winning Parasite – it stars Robert Pattinson as Mickey Barnes, a down-on-his-luck Earthling who signs up to become an ‘expendable’ worker on a human colony. In a nutshell, it’s a highly dangerous job and so he’s fully expected to die multiple times while carrying out his tasks, with a clone replacing him every time he does. However, things go pear-shaped when one of the clones is mistakenly presumed dead, meaning that two Mickeys end up existing side by side…
It’s a fascinating premise alright, and considering Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning credentials should be a cracking movie. But what have critics been saying about it? Here are some quotes from the first reviews…
The Outside Scoop’s Scott Mendelson highlighted the film’s political messaging, calling the movie “a gleefully cynical and grim riff on corporatized government run by self-idealizing idiots who hide behind religion as they turn the working class into literal expendable widgets”.
The Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw was largely positive about the film, hailing it as “visually spectacular, with some very sharp, angular moments of pathos and horror”.
And in her four-star write-up, Empire’s Helen O’Hara also heaped a fair amount of praise on it, stating: “Like Mickey himself, it’s goofy and a little inconsistent, but it’s also funny, thoughtful and more plausible than we might like.” She rounded off her review by labelling Mickey 17 as “a charming space oddity for these unusual times”.
Clarisse Loughrey, writing for the Independent, gave Mickey 17 five stars out of five, describing Bong Joon-ho’s movie as “an absurdist, anti-capitalist, Trump-mocking masterpiece”.
Screen Daily scribe Tim Grierson paid particular attention to the leading man’s performance, writing: Pattinson has fun playing the Mickeys – one timid, one hostile – but it’s his performance as Mickey 17 that gives this sci-fi picture its resonance. Dying over and over, our hero just wants to make sure his soul survives; Pattinson locates it from the first frame.”
As for Sight and Sound’s Roger Luckhurst, he took a shine to another of the film’s actors – who many viewers will recognise from a popular TV series. “One slavish devotee we follow is played by the English comedian Tim Key, perhaps best known as Sidekick Simon to Alan Partridge. It’s a quirk turn, performed for most of the film in a fancy-dress pigeon outfit: an indication of Bong’s pleasing devotion to oddity.”
Finally, Hannah Strong from Little White Lies noted the similarities between Mickey 17 and Bong Joon-ho’s previous movies, writing: “It’s the same mix of prescient sci-fi, zany humour and creature feature that he’s shown an affinity for across The Host, Snowpiercer and Okja – for his third English-language film, director Bong returns to familiar territory, but with no less ambition or heart than he has shown throughout his career.”
On the whole, then, the early reviews for Mickey 17 have been very positive. Why not come and see it on the big screens at Cineworld, and see for yourself what all the fuss is about…
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