Send in the clones: A review of 'Mickey 17'

To escape their troubles on Earth, Mickey (Robert Pattinson) and his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) sign up for this one-way voyage. Timo is relatively clever and signs up to be a pilot, but Mickey, who is, to put it bluntly, stubbornly stupid, signs up unwittingly in the role of an Expendable, the worst class of laborer that no one — I mean NO ONE — usually signs up for. Until now.

You see, these Expendables get cloned so that when they die, their memories are uploaded to another version of themselves and re-created anew. Because of this quasi-immortality, Expendables are tasked with the most dangerous duties on and off the ship.

So after Mickey Prime dies horrifically early on the journey, he is quickly “reborn” as Mickey 2 on a very strange 3D printer, where the materials are flesh, blood, bone, personalities, memories, etc. This continues after every painful death, as we get Mickey 3, 4, 5 and so on until …

We start the film with the 17th iteration of Mickey. When the colonists finally reach their destination, he is of course given the perilous duty of exploring the surface. He ends up in an unfortunate encounter with a strange and intelligent alien species.

His pilot buddy decides to leave him for dead (after all, why risk a rescue, when they can just reprint his buddy) and upon return to the ship, Mickey 18 is created. However, 17 survives and gets back on board. The one rule of cloning is that only one version of an Expendable can be alive. When there are multiple versions running around, they both must be destroyed. This becomes the crux of our story.

There are some very funny moments throughout the film, but quite often I had to check myself wondering if it was appropriate to laugh. I suppose this is the mark of the best satire from Horace to Salman Rushdie to George Carlin.

Robert Pattinson continues his excellent acting career alternating between blockbuster event movies like “The Batman” and smaller, subversive, indie movies like the “Twilight” saga. Just kidding, I mean smaller films like “The Lighthouse.”

“Mickey 17” with its nine-figure budget is, I suppose, of a larger budget, however, thanks to Bong, plays like a weird auteur film. Let’s call it a dependie film.

Most of his work is with the two aforementioned versions — 17 is a pathetic loser akin to the first version, but 18 is more aggressive, a sociopathic alpha. They often share the same screen, and that special effect is seamless. The movie relies heavily on Mickey 17’s voiceover, so Pattinson’s delivery is critical, and he hits his mark.

The actor is quite game for this role. Neither of the Mickeys are particularly likable characters, so, to his credit, Pattinson goes all in. He also mines a bit of gold finding the very few nuggets of redemption in the characters. Despite his subpar intelligence, Mickey can feel questions of identity and self worth — there are existential curiosities regarding this very strange version of eternal life. If you can “live forever” via cloning, then is any part of his life truly meaningful? No one enjoys playing a game where you win 100% of the time. It’s the possibility of loss that makes the winning fun.

It’s a very bizarre movie. And it’s far from perfect. It was oddly paced and felt leaden. Whether that’s a bug of the filmmaking, or a feature of the source material, I can’t tell. But more aggressive editing may have been helpful.

It’s possible Bong juggled too many themes. His trademark pitch black humor finds targets in class inequities, religion, stupid group dynamics, ethnocentrism, species-centrism, colonization, capitalism, the hubris of science. There are some less than subtle digs at current politics, too.

But the issues of identity were the best part of the movie. They should have leaned more heavily on Pattinson’s performance and boarded the Ship of Theseus. That would have been the best version of “Mickey 17.” Perhaps they could just start over and do so in “Mickey 17 — 2,” or “3.”

But who’s counting?