Mickey 17 (2025) – Review

2025  •  Warner Bros. Pictures

Rated:  R

Length:  2 h  17min

Dark Comedy ~ Drama ~ Sci-Fi

Director:  Bong Joon Ho

Writer:  Bong Joon Ho

Actors:  Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Patsy Ferran, Cameron Britton, Daniel Henshall, Stephen Park, Anamaria Vartolomei, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo.

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He’s Dying To Save Mankind.

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Official Trailer

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The Book

Mickey 17 is based on the Science Fiction Novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton Published February 15, 2022. Mickey7 was followed by a Sequel Novel, Antimatter Blues, in March 2023.

Mickey Barnes is an Expendable, a disposable employee, on a Space expedition sent to colonize the ice world Niflheim. When there’s a mission that’s too dangerous, even suicidal, the crew turns to Mickey. After one Mickey dies, a new one is regenerated with most of his memories intact. After six deaths, Mickey7 understands the terms of his deal, and why it was the only position unfilled when he took it. On a scouting mission, Mickey7 goes missing and is presumed dead. By the time he returns there’s a new clone, Mickey8,  and there can only be one Expendable. If they’re caught, they are both going into the recycler.

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Mickey 17 (2025) – Review

Mickey 17 is set in 2050, where down‑on‑his‑luck Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) signs up for a deep‑space colonization mission to escape a murderous loan shark and a life going nowhere on Earth. His best friend Timo (Steven Yeun) lands a gig as a shuttle pilot, but Mickey gets the worst job on the ship: “Expendable,” the poor soul they send on every lethal assignment because when he dies, they just print a new body and upload his memories. On the long voyage to the frozen world of Niflheim, Mickey endures death after death in the name of progress, slowly realizing that to the officers and politicians running this mission, he’s less a person and more a reusable tool. Somewhere in the middle of all this, he falls in love with security agent Nasha Adjaya (Naomi Ackie), complicating things when a different version of Mickey starts competing for the same life and girl.

When the ship finally reaches Niflheim, the human colonists find out they’re not alone; the planet is home to mysterious native beings called Creepers, and relations with them are tense at best and deadly at worst. A bureaucratic, image‑obsessed governor, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), and his scheming wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) are more concerned with power and optics than basic survival, and Mickey is constantly pushed into the line of fire to clean up their messes. Things spin further out of control when a printing mishap leaves two active versions of Mickey—Mickey 17 and Mickey 18—alive at the same time, each with the same memories but very different ideas about how this story should go. As the colony teeters on the edge of collapse, the Creepers close in, and Marshall tightens his grip, the Mickeys are forced to decide whether they’re going to keep playing along as expendable property or finally stand up as people who deserve to live.

Mickey 17 is absolutely worth a stream if you like your sci-fi weird, funny, and a little melancholy, the way Bong Joon Ho does best. If The Fifth Element is the loud, neon, cartoon-wild cousin of Sci-Fi, Mickey 17 is the quieter, weirder one in the corner, cracking dark jokes about being expendable while the system grinds on. The movie juggles dark humor about death and cloning with genuine emotional beats about identity, class, and who gets treated as disposable when big systems need a sacrifice. Robert Pattinson has a blast playing multiple iterations of Mickey, leaning into the absurdity of dying over and over while still finding something human and fragile underneath.

Mickey 17 also feels like a second cousin to Snowpiercer and Okja—angry at injustice but wrapped in genre thrills so you never feel like you’re being lectured. The world-building on Niflheim is cool, the Creepers add a strange, almost fairy-tale menace, and the supporting cast—especially Mark Ruffalo’s egomaniacal Marshall and Toni Collette’s razor-sharp Ylfa—keep the tension and the satire humming. If you’re into off-beat sci-fi with a heart and a mean streak, Mickey 17 is just what you’re looking for.

Mickey 17 (2025) – Review by Amelia @ Streaming Movie Night.

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Movie Stills

Mickey 17 (2025) – Review © 2026 Streaming Movie Night