A Telephone Review

Mickey 17 is, determinately, a film. It came out this year, or maybe sometime close to the end of last year. The author seems to recall that Mark Ruffalo is in it. So is Robert Pattinson – a few times over, actually. Mickey 17 is a film about clones, about aliens, about the immateriality and consequence of selling your life to a corporation, or… maybe the military? Capitalism definitely plays a significant part in the telling of this story. That much is non-negotiable and could probably also be said about most other media we see today. I think this film takes place on a spaceship. 

I should probably admit this now: I have not seen this movie. I heard about it from several of my friends, and from friends of friends, both good things and bad, but I haven’t even seen a single trailer for Mickey 17. It has been written down on a sticky note in my office here at the Sentry, along with a list of about 10 other films, recommended by people from all aspects of my life, that I have not yet had the chance to watch for myself.  

There’s absolutely no way I would be able to get even a quarter of the way through this list soon, so I’ve invented a brand new, never-before-seen method of absorbing media without taking any significant amount of time at all! This revolutionary “through-the-grapevine” approach of watching film may have originated in the ancient high-school history of opening SparkNotes when you realize you had a reading due today and your class starts in three minutes. 

Surely, having a friend explain a film to you for 10 minutes is just as effective as watching the whole thing, right? 

That being said, here is my well-informed review of Mickey 17. (There may or may not be spoilers from here on out. I wouldn’t know.) 

Mickey 17 is a sci-fi film about a guy (Robert Pattinson) who needs money, so he sells himself to a corporation without reading the fine print and ends up becoming a test subject and clone for the most dangerous experiments and research on a spaceship. He might be running from tax collectors, or something along those lines. He gets a girlfriend somewhere along the way. He also dies many times, and is replaced by a new clone every time, hence when we reach “Mickey 17.” But this time, something goes wrong. Mickey 17 is thought to have died, but he didn’t – and they make a new clone, Mickey 18, anyway. They aren’t supposed to both be there, and this is probably a big conflict for the rest of the film. One of the two Mickeys is kind of unhinged. I forget which. There is also a giant planet that the corporation is attempting to explore for potential habitation, and this is where Mickey 17 supposedly died, but was found again. He falls into a pit, and runs into this weird creature that (maybe) can talk to him? He can understand it. And that is also probably an important conflict for the rest of the film. There’s also a leader of this ship, Mark Ruffalo, and his wife, played probably by some other actress. I’m not sure if I understood the whole thing with the mayor’s wife and her desire to make sauces out of the creatures on this planet, but I do remember being told about it. They bring a baby roly-poly alien back to the ship, and then the mother gets angry and there’s a big fight. 

Anyways, in the end, there may or may not be a giant explosion of the cloning machine, and Mickey 18 sacrifices himself for the cause (or just because he can. He might have been the unhinged one.) Mickey 17 and his girlfriend live out their lives happily on this new planet amongst the roly-poly creatures, and nobody was ever cloned again. The end.  

I’d give this movie a 4/10. A lot of the plot points were unclear, and I didn’t really get it. This is obviously no fault of my own.