Finally, after six years of waiting, Bong Joon-ho’s follow-up to Parasite is almost here.
Titled Mickey 17, based on a novel by Edward Ashton, it’s a surreal sci-fi story about a man (Robert Pattinson) who agrees to a dangerous job where if (more like when) he dies he’ll be brought back to life and then forced to keep working. And then when he dies again, the process repeats all over again. As the title suggests, poor Mickey has done this over and over and over.
The first trailer for Mickey 17 just debuted — watch it below.
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This movie has been a long time coming; the first official image from the film debuted way back in December of 2022. And Bong’s Parasite won the Academy Award for Best Picture in early 2020 — right before the start of the Covid pandemic. So it’s been quite a while waiting to see how he would try to top it.
This is not Bong’s first elaborate sci-fi film. In 2013 he made Snowpiercer, a dystopian sci-fi film about a group of survivors of a climate apocalypse struggling to survive on a train that never stops amidst a new Ice Age.
Here is the film’s official synopsis:
From the Academy Award-winning writer/director of “Parasite,” Bong Joon Ho, comes his next groundbreaking cinematic experience, “Mickey 17.” The unlikely hero, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) has found himself in the extraordinary circumstance of working for an employer who demands the ultimate commitment to the job… to die, for a living.
Mickey 17 is scheduled to open in theaters on January 31, 2025. It’s sort of surprising, given Parasite’s awards track record, that Warner Bros. elected not to put this out as an end-of-year, awards-y type title. Make of that what you will.
The Trailer for Mickey 17
Mickey wakes up from some kind of sleep. He’s in a strange, futuristic environment. He’s got a strange job — a job where he’s paid to risk his life. He is, as the title card says, an ‘expendable’.
And, as it turns out, Mickey hates dying — even if it is a part of his job. This is something we’ve heard again and again throughout the trailer.
“Even on my 17th go-around, I hate dying,” he says in the trailer before encountering his first “multiple” of himself.
This is something we learn from the trailer: When Mickey dies, his consciousness is somehow copied to another body. And when that body dies, he gets copied again. And so on.
Mickey 17’s Multiple Personalities
To Mickey’s surprise, he might not have died after all. Well, that’s awkward. He encounters several “multiples” of himself that Mark Ruffalo’s character asserts must be “exterminated.”
And in the face of so much death, there is one overriding theme — a theme that has been present in Bong’s works for a long time, even before Parasite: It’s the struggle of people against the powerful. This is a common theme in the Parasite’s rich and powerful family versus the poor family and in Snowpiercer’s rich and powerful people in the front of the train versus the poor and desperate in the back.
We see this same idea in Mickey 17, with Mickey fighting back against his powerful employers and trying to protect himself and others.
Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17
The film is the Academy Award-winning “Parasite” writer-director’s first feature since the 2019 thriller’s critical success. “Parasite” made history as the first foreign language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Ruffalo, Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie and Toni Collette join Pattinson for the Warner Bros. Pictures production.
Oscar winners for “Moonlight” Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner teamed up with Bong and Dooho Choi to produce the film with An Offscreen Production. Other executive producers on the project include Brad Pitt, Jesse Ehrman, Peter Dodd and Marianne Jenkins.
“Mickey 17” will premiere in theaters Jan. 31, 2025, pushed back from an earlier March 2024 release date.
Watch the trailer here:
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