Mickey 17 Review

March 11, 2025 at 4:47am
By Jason Stettner

This is a self contained sci-fi adventure that follows one expendable individual dying many times for the seemingly advancement of his space faring crew. He’s cloned after death, dealing with the pain and changes across the cycles of continuing to come back many times over.

It’s an interesting premise and they don’t always necessarily use that concept to its full advantage. It’s a rather bleak comedy where the moments of hilarity are semi sparse but do at times definitely deliver but I know this sort of humor won’t be for all. It is very dark, so just be prepared for that as it’s a mature story.

Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) has been having some troubles on Earth with his overly charismatic pal Timo (Steven Yeun). To escape these problems Timo gets to become a pilot whereas Mickey ain’t so lucky and signs up to be an expendable. A position that no sane person wants to step into, so he automatically gets the roll on this ship heading out to colonize a planet.

This voyage is headed by the very clearly politically inspired Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) who basically runs a cult. It’s another fun role for Ruffalo, he’s been rocking these outlandish roles recently. So that’s essentially the background context, you see Mickey dealing with death until things change. He’s gone through many iterations, and pain.

Largely this has been due to his growing love with Nasha (Naomi Ackie) where there are scenes of nudity involved often throughout the film. I mention that in case it matters to you. The real interesting part of the movie aside from some laughs from this dark situation is when things don’t go right. Only one iteration is allowed to exist at once and through some interesting moments we see two pair up.

Now, this is where the movie sort of falls off a cliff. It’s about sixty percent in or so and it just plateaus or well becomes too generic and predictable. They spend no time playing around with the concept of duplicates and it just becomes a typical sci-fi adventure about dealing with encounters. There was so much to play with here and the whole thing sort of becomes forgettable which is a shame. I still liked it.

I’d really like to highlight that the performances here were rather strong and while Pattinson has a silly vibe to the voicing it works for the type of character and made his almost docile approach make sense. Everyone was certainly into what they were doing, and it worked from that perspective.

I did have some issues where some characters come and go, particularly one individually being there at the fork in the road then randomly vanishing to randomly appear later at the ending serving no purpose. It was weird and felt like they didn’t know what to do with the character.

The visuals here are splendid, normally it’s hard to achieve a believable and quality sci-fi experience but they nailed it. The visual quality of the life onboard the ship and some of the sights outside of it. It looks really great. I do wish they maybe went a bit more for spectacle but it’s all aesthetically pleasing and the budget was used effectively here for sure.

The Conclusion

Mickey 17 proposes a rather unique concept and while it plays with it a tad, it never really commits to what the potential could have been. I certainly had some laughs at times but it didn’t seem to connect with everyone at the theater. There were other moments I believe were supposed to be funny that just sort of weren’t. It’s a simpler narrative than what the concept here could have been and that really was disappointing.

I very much checked out about sixty percent of the way through as you knew exactly where everything was headed. It was still a fun adventure and I enjoyed viewing it. It’s not something I’d really care to watch again but it was a fine one off experience. I just feel like it had a lot of wasted potential, at least it looks visually great I suppose.

Mickey 17 Review at Theater with Standard Viewing
Screening Provided by Warner Brothers

Rating Overall: 7.2