Photograph courtesy of Warner Bros
Words by Billie Walker
Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers for Mickey 17.
The year is 2054 A.D. and Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), along with many of Earth’s inhabitants, is desperate to leave his polluted and impoverished planet. In Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s first film since Parasite, the effects of climate change have finally caught up with us, and people will do anything to get out.
Storms rage outside as thousands of citizens line up to apply for a space colony expedition program that will allow them to exit the planet for good. But skills that once kept the average civilian employed and fed are now worthless for space travel. Only a select few are chosen; for many others, the surest guarantee of passage is to volunteer as an “expendable.” The term, coined by the technology’s financial backers, refers to humans who can be infinitely reprinted after death and their memories installed into new bodies thanks to “personality back-ups” stored on brick-like hard drives.
In typical capitalist fashion Joon-ho clearly delights in skewering, this new regenerative technology exploits society’s poorest by creating a new league of working class people regularly killed and reprinted in the name of scientific research. Becoming an expendable “lab rat” is Mickey’s fateful ticket onboard. His entire life, he says, “is a goddamn punishment.” But the brutal truth quickly becomes clear. He’s not just a worker; he’s property, and his suffering is part of the deal. “From now on, you need to get used to dying,” expedition researcher Gemma (Holliday Grainger) tells him. “This is your job.”
The dystopian future Joon-ho presents in Mickey 17, adapted from Edward Ashton’s 2022 book Mickey 7, shares more similarities with our modern world than we might care to admit—and offers a dystopic glimpse at the human cost of space colonialism. Though conditions on Earth have become unsustainable, the experience of the 1% still differs from the rest of us. Unsurprisingly, those who lapped up Earth’s resources deny its salvation and instead use their net worth to venture out for new lands to pilfer.
The movie strikes obvious and uncomfortable parallels to the real world, where our own elite space race is playing out and celebrity politicians and oligarchs are consolidating power in real time.
“The movie strikes obvious and uncomfortable parallels to the real world, where our own elite space race is playing out and celebrity politicians and oligarchs are consolidating power in real time.”
The possibility of a billionaire chartering a spaceship in order to colonize another planet doesn’t read as fantasy, especially on the heels of Jeff Bezos’ rocket completing its first successful launch in January and Elon Musk’s continued ambitions for SpaceX to eventually colonize Mars. In Mickey 17, one such self-titled expedition commander, is the coiffed, tanned, and guffawing Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo). Between his failed runs for the presidency and loud proclamations, Kenneth clearly shares qualities with President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk. The megalomaniac, gene-obsessed billionaire with far-right beliefs wishes to start a colony on a new planet—not for the betterment of humanity, but merely to stroke his insatiable ego and run without opposition. His dream is to take over a “pure white planet” inhabited by a “superior species” with “impeccable genetics”—rhetoric that echoes previous eugenicist statements of Musk and Trump.
With the exception of Kenneth and his wife Gwen Marshall (Toni Collette), who live in a luxurious and opulently-decorated wing of the spacecraft, living conditions shatter any dreams those on board might have had about interstellar immigration.
The reality is significantly worse than that on Earth. Food is inedible, calories are counted, and extracurricular activities are limited, including sex, which is deemed too calorie-intensive and is therefore prohibited to “maximise our survival rate.” The ship itself is far from the sleek modernist designs that have become a regular occurrence in science fiction since 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Nor does it host the lush green spaces of other long-haul crafts as witnessed in Frankie Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) or Claire Denis’s High Life (2019). It is, in fact, closer to an airborne mass incarceration facility.
Things don’t get better when the spaceship reaches its destination. Niflheim is brutally cold with no visible vegetation. This destination is a fiscal decision made out of convenience, rather than in search of the perfect settlement. Kenneth selects Niflheim safe in the knowledge that his financial resources will enable him to continue his opulent existence, while the settlers suffer under the harsh, icy conditions of the new planet.
Mickey 17 draws on fascist and colonial history, combining it with the alt-right values of the present day. The film features countless references to Nazi-era policies, such as a natural birthing plan that encourages settlers to create a pure race on Niflheim, while the clinical trials Mickey is forced to endure harken back to the medical torture inflicted on concentration camp detainees. But while a clear reminder of our violent past, Mickey 17 also sets out the possibilities for a cruel future in which colonialism doubles down on present-day exploitation and expands it past the limitations of Earth.
“As the climate crisis rapidly worsens, it’s becoming all the more clear that this techno-optimism places faith in a handful of moguls who care less about the Earth or humanity’s survival than their own.”
AI technology that has been forcefully integrated into society by tech giants is already displacing workers and stripping humanity from authorship, but the exploitation of expendables in Mickey 17 has a real-world comparison that’s even more prescient. The cloning tech was banned on Earth and yet it has no legal restrictions beyond, similar to the many global companies who station their factories in countries without strong labor laws. In making these loopholes explicit, Joon-ho draws clear parallels between the subhuman treatment of the expendables and the harsh conditions of sweatshop laborers.
Space colonization comes not only at the cost of the human settlers, but also to the detriment of the Indigenous communities they encounter. In most sci-fi films that explore colonization, the Indigenous species is often humanoid, like the blue skinned Na’vi tribe of James Cameron’s Avatar films. But the derogatively named “creepers” that inhabit Niflheim are far from human in appearance, and just as expendable to Kenneth as Mickey is.
In choosing to invent a creature with the many limbs of an insect and the thick hide of an aardvark, Joon-ho references the “vermin” imagery often conjured by the right-wing media when depicting immigration. He reminds us that what the far right—and Kenneth—denounce as “swarms” are living beings struggling for their survival. This distortion of the “other” as a threat is a well-worn tactic, one that fuels xenophobia and justifies violence under the guise of self-defense. But for Joon-ho, a creature’s right to live is non-negotiable—and should certainly not depend on a shared likeness to humanity. “You call them aliens,” Mickey’s girlfriend Nasha Adjaya (Naomi Ackie) tells Kenneth. “We are the aliens you fucking moron.”
Technology has continued to advance over decades, and we’re repeatedly promised progress will eventually save us from climate change. But as the climate crisis rapidly worsens, it’s becoming all the more clear that this techno-optimism places faith in a handful of moguls who care less about the Earth or humanity’s survival than their own. Mickey 17 presents us with a not-impossible future that mirrors our colonial past; one in which the wealthy and ruthless claim, in Kenneth’s words, “kingdoms beyond the stars” that leave Earth’s people and native space species to pay the price.
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