“What’s it like to die?” people keep asking Mickey Barnes in Mickey 17, the latest film by South Korean director Bong Joon-ho. Mickey, played by Robert Pattinson, is an “Expendable,” a task rabbit who performs dangerous work on board a spaceship headed for the icy planet of Niflheim. Each time Mickey loses his life, whether by exposing himself to unknown viruses in Niflheim’s atmosphere or losing his arm to a stray asteroid on a spacewalk, his brain and body are put back together by a 3D printer, so he’s ready for another round.
Mickey didn’t choose to become an Expendable. Back on Earth, he and a friend wound up in debt to a sadistic loan shark who promised to chase them to the edge of the world. The expedition to Niflheim offered an escape, but room was limited — and without any skills or credentials, assuming the undesirable role of Expendable turned out to be the only way Mickey could tag along.
The financial desperation that sends Mickey away from Earth, and the horrific working conditions he is subjected to on the road to Niflheim, echo themes of capitalist exploitation present in Bong’s previous films — notably Snowpiercer and Parasite — not to mention other staples of South Korean media, like Netflix’s Squid Games. In Mickey 17, capitalism is closely connected to Christianity, another export product brought to Korea through its relations with the West, specifically the United States. When watching the films of a class-conscious filmmaker like Bong, one invariably gets the impression that these institutions have to be destroyed before they can destroy us.
Similar to Parasite, Mickey 17 is ultimately about the ethics of revolutionary struggle. The film considers how Christian morality — especially as understood by thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, or Karl Marx, the latter of whom famously referred to religion as the “opiate” of the masses — prevents the downtrodden from standing up for their rights. Here, Pattinson’s Mickey is a clear stand-in for Christ and the model Christian. Resurrected ad infinitum, he humbly accepts the pain, suffering, and dehumanization inflicted on him by his apathetic, at times downright demonic coworkers as punishment for his perceived sins: hurting a frog in his high school biology class, causing the car accident that killed his mother.
In addition to rising from the dead, Mickey resembles Christ insofar as his lethal exposure to Niflheim’s atmosphere allows the scientists on board the spaceship to develop a vaccine. In other words, Mickey dies — more than once — so that the others can live and, mirroring Christ’s own fate, receives little to no thanks from those he rescues. On the contrary, many consider Mickey’s regeneratable body to be an abomination, even a “work of Satan.” To complete the comparison, Bong includes a shot of a dying Mickey being held by his girlfriend, Nasha, evoking the pietà: that ubiquitous subject in Roman Catholic art, showing the Virgin Mary cradling Christ after his descent from the cross.
Bong contrasts this Mickey (the titular Mickey 17) to Mickey 18, who is printed into existence after the former miraculously survives what his neglectful coworkers assumed to have been a fatal accident. Where Mickey 17 is self-effacing and subservient, Mickey 18 is rude and rebellious, willing and able to stand up for himself and take revenge against those who wrong him. In short, Mickey 18 is a revolutionary untamed by Marx’s opiate. Instead of blaming himself for his mother’s death, for instance, he points the finger at society and promptly plans to take down those in charge.
If Mickey 17 resembles Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, the Christlike protagonist of Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot — someone whose nativity and kindheartedness render him vulnerable to abuse and manipulation — Mickey 18 is more akin to Ivan Karamazov, the agnostic antihero of The Brothers Karamazov who, supposing there is an omnipotent, benevolent God, as his pious family believes, would curse that God for creating a universe so filled with unavenged, unjustifiable suffering. If the suffering of the innocent is part of God’s plan, Ivan says, I don’t want it, and “declare in advance that all the truth in the world is not worth the price!”
Mickey 17 — perhaps due to the conventions of the science-fiction genre, perhaps due to the increasingly tense state of real-world politics — reaches a far less ambiguous crescendo than 2019’s Parasite. Where the latter film chose as its antagonists a wealthy family with both good and not-so-good qualities, Mickey 17’s villain, Kenneth Marshall, a failed politician turned space colonizer played by Mark Ruffalo, is utterly beyond redemption. Akin to the greedy, gluttonous, self-obsessed aristocrats who control the eponymous train in Snowpiercer, Marshall and his equally off-putting wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) leave Earth for ambiguous reasons but soon talk of populating the white surface of Niflheim with a corresponding white “master race.”
Along the way, he turns from what many see as a vague stand-in for Donald Trump, what with being a failed politician and all, into the current U.S. president’s mirror image: a vainglorious fool convinced of his own greatness, surrounded by sycophantic cameramen who, via talk shows and news broadcasts, relay a misleading image of their leader to the rest of the ship. The longer the film drags on, the more Ruffalo’s speech and mannerisms begin to resemble Trump’s.
It is in Marshall — a godless man who claims to have God on his side, whose expedition is financed by a mysterious “church” — that the perils of capitalism and Christian dogmatism, the twin threats of American colonialism, ultimately converge.
Sticking with the term “dogmatism,” it is important to note that Mickey 17 does not take issue with Christianity in and of itself, but Christianity used as a political weapon and method of subjugation. In short, the type of Christianity wielded by the United States against Native Americans, Koreans, and numerous other peoples and cultures throughout history. The film does not outright reject the importance of universal values like kindness and compassion. Instead, it merely points out the danger of those who weaponize these otherwise admirable qualities. After all, what better way to keep people in line than by telling them they should always turn the other cheek, no matter how hard they’re being hit?
Tim Brinkhof is a U.S.-based Dutch journalist who writes about religion, politics, and history.
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