Bong Joon Ho’s interstellar clone drama might not have broken the box office—but it’s already earned its place in sci-fi cinema’s long memory.
A Return to the Future
When Bong Joon Ho releases a film, expectations are not just high—they’re orbital. After the Oscar-sweeping Parasite, the South Korean auteur returned with Mickey 17, a science fiction black comedy based on Edward Ashton’s novel. Starring Robert Pattinson in one of his most enigmatic roles to date, the film premiered in February 2025, and now, one month on, we can finally take stock of what it left behind: clones, existentialism, and a divided audience.
The Art of Multiplicity
Set in 2054, Mickey 17 centers on a man designated as “expendable”—a clone who is killed repeatedly on a colonization mission, only to be regenerated anew. The twist? After a malfunction, both Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 exist at the same time. What follows is less a space epic and more an intimate, chaotic duel of selves.
Bong’s signature blend of genres is in full swing: dystopian sci-fi meets slapstick existentialism. The film flirts with body horror, spirals into bureaucratic absurdity, and occasionally breathes in moments of eerie calm. Robert Pattinson’s layered performance—equal parts deadpan, disoriented, and desperately human—anchors the film’s otherwise fragmented universe.
Critical Praise, Audience Divide
The Reviews have been notably polarized. Critics praised the film’s visual audacity and cerebral tension. Some hailed it as Bong’s most conceptually daring work since Snowpiercer, while others felt the narrative lacked cohesion. Yet even its detractors acknowledged the film’s ambition.
The Audience reactions mirror this split. Sci-fi fans embraced the layered world-building and philosophical questions, while mainstream viewers found the tone—shifting from comedy to tragedy in a heartbeat—more challenging. This isn’t Interstellar, and it doesn’t try to be.
A Modest Box Office, a Long Tail of Influence
Commercially, Mickey 17 underperformed by studio standards, grossing around $130 million globally against a budget of $118 million. However, measuring its success by numbers alone would have missed the point. Like many of Bong’s earlier films, Mickey 17 seems destined for a second life in retrospectives, think pieces, and niche fandoms. It is, simply put, a grower.
In fact, one could argue this is Bong’s most “American” film yet—not in tone, but in the way it interrogates imperialist ambition, labor exploitation, and the fragility of individual identity. The colony on Niflheim may be fiction, but the system it critiques is not.
Clones and Questions That Linger
One month later, what Mickey 17 leaves us with is not answers, but resonance. The double clone scenario becomes a metaphor for self-estrangement, for the parts of ourselves we wish we could overwrite, for the things we keep killing to survive.
In the words of a recurring phrase from the film: “You are not the original. But you are not nothing.”
It’s a statement that sticks—like stardust in the back of the throat.
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