Mickey 17 is masterfully made. Just in terms of production design and special effects alone: the scenes with Robert Pattinson interacting with his clone could’ve been the showpiece of a different movie, and they were done so seamlessly that it started to feel like it would’ve been cheaper and easier simply to invent an actual machine to print a duplicate of him.
And that’s before we see the Mickeys interacting with swarms of alien creatures — in a snowstorm! — and they all feel so present that I had to keep reminding myself that I was looking at special effects.
But it was overall too broad for me to really love it. It is completely and unapologetically a comedy, almost always avoiding the temptation to deviate into clever satire when a much bigger and more obvious gag is available.
I think Toni Collette is wonderful, but as with a lot of great actors, she clearly chose this project for the chance to let loose, have fun, and go completely over the top. Still, she gets a scene at the end in which she has to be menacingly evil instead of just cartoonishly evil, and it’s so effective that you understand how so few actors would’ve been able to make it work. Mark Ruffalo seems to be feeding off of her energy, and he somehow manages to make his performance in Poor Things feel like restrained naturalism.
A detail that’s a good example of how Mickey 17 is a smart movie playing things cartoonishly broad: the scenes of a new Mickey being printed, which happens a lot, as you might expect from the premise and the title. Each time, the body does a quick jerk back into the machine as it’s rolling out, keeping it from feeling like some miraculous wonder, and instead making it clear that it’s just another ultimately clumsy and analog piece of dehumanizing technology. I loved it as a wonderfully understated gag.
But as more and more Mickeys get printed, the crew becomes increasingly blasé about the whole process, so we see Mickey’s body unceremoniously dumped out of the machine until the techs can scramble to get the bed in place. In a later repeat of the same gag, no one even notices, and he just flops out of the machine naked onto the floor. It’s really the same idea as the small jerk of the print bed, but it’s played so broad that nobody could possibly miss it.
And throughout, it felt like there was a more clever and understated movie floating just below the surface of the cartoon. I suppose it’s a virtuoso piece of filmmaking simply because it still managed to play on my emotions even though it was a cartoon.
One thing I liked in particular was a scene early on, when we see Mickey’s love-at-first-sight introduction to security officer Nasha. Ruffalo’s character is on stage making a bombastic speech, and that’s all that we hear — we can see Mickey and Nasha meeting each other, and we can guess at what they’re thinking because of their facial expressions, but we can’t hear anything that’s being said.
I thought it was a fantastic way to suggest that it doesn’t matter what was being said. For key moments like that, we often don’t remember what we said, but we definitely remember how we felt. It seemed like such a poignant way to show a key memory for someone who is nothing except for his memories.
It also didn’t go in the direction that I’d expected it to go, which was a welcome surprise. But explaining exactly how requires spoilers. To sum up my review: I thought Mickey 17 was very, very good, and I just wish that it had allowed itself to be great.
My spoiler observation: by the middle of the movie, when Mickey has dinner with Kai, I thought that it was re-contextualizing the earlier scene meeting Nasha. Now, I assumed, that scene had been silent to underscore the difference between infatuation and a deeper connection. We saw Nasha and Mickey having fun together (and lots of sex), but Kai seemed to be kind, compassionate, and genuinely concerned about Mickey’s well-being and how he was being treated. And I thought that the movie would go on with Kai’s suggestion of her getting 17 and Nasha keeping 18.
I do think that the direction the movie actually went was much better, though. It suggests that the relationship between Nasha and Mickey is the deeper one, because she’s been in love with every version of him, not just the one that seems sympathetic. And as we see later on, she went to extremes to stay with him when he needed her. So not only is the movie’s version more satisfying, but it’s also less judgy and more sex-positive!
And speaking of the scene showing Nasha staying with Mickey: at several points throughout the movie, someone asks Mickey what it’s like to die, and he gets pissed off by the question and refuses to answer. I’d thought that we would get the revelation that he has to keep dying over and over but he still doesn’t actually know what it’s like. The machine only records his memories up to a certain point, so it seems like he’d remember only as far back as his last time back in the lab, and never the actual point of death.
But the scene with Nasha holding Mickey after he’s been exposed to the nerve gas clearly shows that he’s wearing the helmet which, presumably, is recording everything. So he can remember at least one death.
The whole premise of the movie doesn’t really work if Mickey remembers everything every time; 18 has to be surprised to see 17 show up. But I haven’t decided which alternative I like better: Mickey remembers one death, and he can only tell Kai that it’s terrible; or that he’s done it more than anyone else but still has no idea what it’s actually like.
Before I make it sound like the comedy didn’t work, there is another gag that I thought was brilliant and hilarious. When Mickey is talking to one of the aliens, explaining something crucially important, and the alien’s response is translated as “say what?”