‘Mickey 17’: Robert Pattinson lives to die in sci-fi comedy
The “expendable” Mickey (Robert Pattinson) is left to die by his co-worker (Steven Yeun) in a clip from Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi comedy “Mickey 17.”
An out-of-his mind lighthouse keeper. A brooding vampire. A small-time criminal. Batman.
Robert Pattinson has played so many roles that it inspired Korean director Bong Joon Ho to cast him as multiple versions of the same dude – 18 of them, in fact – in a followup to the filmmaker’s Oscar-winning “Parasite.”
In the dark sci-fi comedy “Mickey 17” (in theaters Friday), Pattinson plays Mickey Barnes, a guy who owes money to the wrong people and tries to leave Earth ASAP. He signs up to be an “expendable” on a colonizing expedition to an ice planet, but never reads the fine print: Mickey becomes a lowly worker who’s regularly put in ultra-hazardous situations, and when he dies, a new Mickey is printed out with a high-tech machine and discarded organic material, with all his memories intact. Over and over and over again.
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On one mission, Mickey 17 is left for dead but is saved by the planet’s indigenous species. He’s rescued and runs into Mickey 18, which causes all sorts of political, personal and existential issues for the underdog hero.
Watching Pattinson in “The Lighthouse,” “I could just see the madness in his eyes in that performance, and that’s exactly what I wanted for Mickey 18,” Bong says through a translator. Pattinson’s superhero in “The Batman” is “different from Mickey in every single way, but there was this strange sense of melancholy to that character. His version of Batman just constantly was blaming himself. I thought that could resonate with Mickey, in some ways.”
“Mickey 17” examines themes of identity and colonialism, but in adapting Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel “Mickey7,” Bong was most attracted to exploring Mickey as a sad character who’s been printed more than a dozen times. It’s “presented as this advanced technology, but if you think about it, it’s kind of tragic, ridiculous and cruel, all at the same time,” the director says. “And in the middle of it is Mickey and all the struggles and turmoils that he goes through in those circumstances.
“His story felt very much like a journey of him recovering his selfhood (and) his self-esteem, maturing into reclaiming his own humanity.”
Pattinson thought it was an intriguing role, someone with no self-worth haunted his whole life by thinking he caused the accident that killed his mom by pushing a button in their car when he was a little boy. “I found it this fascinating thing to think, when you have a 5-year-old’s mentality, ‘I pressed the button and then my mom died and then my life turned (bad) afterwards,’” he says. “You get 20 years in the future and there’s so many things tangled up in your mind and it becomes more and more true the more things that go wrong.”
But every Mickey is a little different: Co-worker/girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) calls 17 “mild Mickey” and 18 “habanero Mickey.” The latter is essentially a misprint because when the scientists are printing him out, one of them trips and dislodges one of the cables on the machine, so “18 comes out completely insane, basically,” Pattinson says. “It’s almost like he knows he’s only got a little bit of time on the planet and wants to live it up as much as he can and basically just exists to teach 17 a lesson, in a lot of ways.”
Bong joked among fellow filmmakers that “if this film were to be turned into a Netflix series, each Mickey would have his own episode and the episode would begin with the new iteration coming out of the printer,” he says. The film offers glimpses of some old Mickeys – Nos. 12 through 16 die in vaccine trials during a zippy montage ― while others are mentioned in passing: No. 6 is the annoying and clingy one.
“He can only process each individual Mickey as a separate being to himself because it’s like, you are not human anymore. You’re literally made out of trash,” Pattinson says. “He has empathy for all these previous incarnations of himself. It’s just a way of him dealing with the sort of awful situation he’s got himself in. Instead of saying, ‘Oh my God, I’m having a total existential crisis,’ it’s like, ‘No, that was my older brother Mickey 3 who existed three months ago.’”
The human printing machine itself symbolizes the film’s “tone and manner,” Bong says. “Despite having this fancy printer and going on colony expeditions, humans are still as pathetic (and) foolish as they are now making the same mistakes.” Looking like a souped-up MRI, it was designed to perform like an inkjet printer from the 1990s.
A Mickey moves in and out, in and out in jittery motion while being printed, and Bong says he had “a lot of fun” playing with the switch that controlled Pattinson coming out of the machine.
In those scenes, “you feel very much like a guinea pig,” Pattinson says. He let a stuntman take over when a Mickey falls out of the printer and onto the floor ― “It’s actually quite complicated to flop out onto your head” ― and didn’t love trying to act unconscious while steel rollers pinched his butt.
On one printing day, Pattinson recalls a new background actor getting an unfortunate job: “They’re like, ‘OK, we want to do a closeup where you’re putting a pipe up Rob’s ass.’ The guy just looked so deeply uncomfortable doing it. I’m sort of sitting there like, ’It’s OK, man, just jam it up there,’ ” he adds, laughing. “It was a real character forming experience.”
