By the time you have entirely grasped what Marshall and Ylfa are up to, who and what they are, the ship is on the planet, and Mickey has died — 16 times, to be exact — in his role as the ship’s “Expendable.” Used to test viruses and other threats, Mickey undergoes brutal trials, and ends up dying on the job only to be reprinted in externally identical form. As with any software update, there are bugs, along with routine mishaps. When the movie opens, Mickey 17 has just plunged into a planet crevasse. Timo, who’s zipping nearby, isn’t interested in rescuing Mickey, who is, after all, disposable. All Timo wants to know is, What’s it like to die?
It’s a question that others on the ship like to ask Mickey, which adds to the melancholia that hangs over this movie even during its bounciest, most carnivalesque moments. As he does, Bong takes a while to fully show his hand. Instead, working swiftly, he introduces this future with characteristic visual flair, flashes of beauty, spasms of comically couched violence and a palpable warmth that attenuates the more abject turns. He also gives Mickey a shipboard romance with Nasha (a lovely Naomi Ackie), a security agent who becomes his protector, an affair that heats up the story. Nasha is normal, just and true, and she helps humanize Mickey. Bong often plays Mickey’s deaths for laughs, but he wants you to feel them.
And you do feel them, at times deeply, amid the flashbacks, pratfalls, peppy edits, roving camerawork and the images of one after another Mickey being dumped like garbage. These scenes can be rightly grim, yet they have a queasily amusing kick because of Bong’s lightness of touch and Mickey’s deadpan fatalism. One of Bong’s undersung strengths is that he’s great with actors, and the work that he and Pattinson do with the character’s voice and silent-clown physicality is crucial to pulling off the movie’s tonal expansiveness. Mickeys come and go, but the one you come to know best is No. 17. He has a distinct nasal whine (shades of Adam Sandler) that, as humor gives way to anguish, becomes a clarion call for decency.
Mickey is so gentle and seemingly helpless that it’s easy to be on his side, but part of what makes him sympathetic is that his misfortune isn’t a matter of just predisposition or predestination, the way it often is in American movies. Mickey tends to make mistakes, and didn’t read all the paperwork when he joined the expedition, but, really, who reads the fine print? He was desperate, owed money and needed to make a fast exit. So, alongside other distressed applicants, he found a solution in a market economy in which everything, life included, has a price. In this case, the cost is a perilous, exploitative job, one that’s the equivalent of, say, butchering factory-farmed hogs in a slaughterhouse. Except that Mickey is the hog.
