Mickey 17 (2025)

Plot of Mickey 17: In 2054 an expedition to the planet Niflheim, an ice world, is recruiting a crew, and friends, Timo and Mickey join up to avoid a loan shark. Timo has skills so becomes a pilot and Mickey without skills becomes an expendable, someone who will die and be reprinted as required. Despite his transient life Mickey becomes the lover of Nasha, a security agent, and once on Niflheim, is exposed numerous times to the planet’s pathogens so that a vaccine can be developed. The seventeenth iteration of Mickey is sent out to capture a creeper, one of the planet’s native life forms. Creepers are sort of large caterpillars. But he falls into a crevasse and is reported by Timo as dead. The creepers rescue him and he returns to the ship, only to find that a new Mickey has been printed. The expedition leader, Marshall, who has a cult like following, is a bit of an idiot, intoxicated by his own public image. Nasha takes on both Mickeys, but Mickey 18 is aggressive and is keen to exterminate Marshall who, when he finds out about the duplicates wants to kill them. He also wants to kill a baby creeper found in a rock, causing legions of creepers to collect out on the ice. Can it get any worse? When Timo receives a threat from a representative of the loan shark requiring him to dismember Mickey we see that it can.

Content: There is non-revelatory sex, and some animated drawings of stick figures doing it, which is a plot device. A drug, Oxysomething is traded and has the effect of making those taking it a bit wild. Nasha and Mickey 18 take it. There are many scenes in the rubbish disposal area of the space ship, which consists of chutes into a glowing morass. Everything, including the Mickey bodies is thrown into it and from it things are reconstituted. Other areas of the space ship are the mess room and a space where Marshall makes speeches, also Nasha’s cabin. Out on the ice Mickey is experimented on vomiting blood and dying before they get the vaccine right. With a translation device he speaks to the chief creeper.

 A View: Apparently this outing is not predicted to make any money, although there were quite a few people in the screen where I saw it at 4 pm last Friday in Madrid. At that time of the week often only my wife and I are in the stalls, so busier than usual. I like the idea of cloned people but lets face it, there’s not a chance in hell of this technology being available in 30 years time, or if it comes to that any form in intergalactic travel. But putting that aside, once we have Mickey 18 on the scene the whole film descends into chaos, sometimes including scenes which make no sense, and which I cannot find a record of anywhere. Perhaps they were part of a longer version, so maybe a film you might choose to watch on your cable channel when it is available. But only if you are an SF or Robert Pattinson fan.

Fun Fact: The director says that Marshall’s character is not based on any specific political individual.