Bong Joon-ho's Robert Pattinson Clone Movie Mickey 17 Looks Proper Bonkers
The instant Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won the Oscar for Best Picture, everyone wondered “What’s next?” The answer, it turns out, is a sci-fi adaptation about clones and death that’s coming out in 2025. We’ve seen the first trailer and it’s absolutely mental.
The movie is called Mickey 17 and it stars the Batman himself, Robert Pattinson. Pattinson plays a man who realizes his job is to die and be cloned, over and over, until one day a clone becomes self-aware. It’s based on a book called Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton, but Joon-ho decided he wanted to kill the character 10 more times, so that’s why his version is Mickey 17. That’s what the Oscar-winning director said at CinemaCon 2024 this week as he revealed, for the first time ever, the trailer for his 2025 sci-fi film. And though the trailer won’t be out for a while, io9 was there, and we have to tell you about it. Because it’s freaking insane.
The whole trailer is set to “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head’ by Dean Martin so, go and play that while you read what’s happening. We start with a spaceship floating over a planet. A man is in a space suit outside the ship, and someone asks if his vertigo is kicking in. He admits he feels a little dizzy when something slices off his hand and it floats out into space.
This is Mickey, Pattinson’s character, who has a kind of squeaky, meek voice, almost like a gangster in a Disney movie. He’s got a new job as an expendable, which means that they do a full scan on his body so that, when he dies, they can just print a new one. Mickey admits he didn’t read the full application so he wasn’t sure what that meant.
So, as an expendable, he’s gotta do all sorts of different missions. We see him working with fire, on an ice planet, and more, and it keeps cutting back to him dying and people shoving a body bag into an incinerator. At one point, the people shoving the body in there realize the person in the body bag is still alive. “It’s fine,” says Mickey, and they shove him down into the flames.
At one point we see a version of him fall through the ice and land totally out of reach. “It’s not looking good for you,” someone says, as a massive creature runs and kills another version of him. Meanwhile, a friend asks him “What does it feel like to die?” Mickey tells him even though he’s used to it after 17 times, he still doesn’t like it. Which is when Mickey goes to his room and lays down next to... another Mickey.
“Why aren’t you dead?” asks the other Mickey, Mickey 18, who has a much more normal, confident voice. We don’t know, but we find out that when “multiple” exist in this world, they must be exterminated. So we see scenes of other clones being murdered including a moment where someone suggests they play Rock Paper Scissor to figure out which of their clones lives.
A bunch of action scenes fly by with the two Mickeys, until one Mickey says to the other Mickey “I don’t like you.” To which the other responds “But I’m you.” “I’m not you!” he retorts and they continue to fight. Then we see the pair back on the ice planet with a whole field full of those creatures from before that look like zombie buffalo. “Not this again.” one says.
So, yeah, Mickey 17 looks pretty damned wild. A movie about dealing with death, but also about figuring out how to live. A movie with a hard, sci-fi premise, but that also has a lot of humor and pathos to it. And multiple Roberts Pattinson.
Mickey 17 opens in theaters January 31, 2025.
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