Mickey 17 Review: A Movie That Hates Trump And It’s Audience

It’s not difficult to figure out why the Hollywood domestic box office dropped another 3% last year. Audiences have become fed up with watching movies from Hollywood that tell the audience how much the industry hates them.

One of the biggest eye-rolling terms out of Hollywood over the two decades is the term satire. Hollywood’s idea of satire is mocking their political enemies and tearing them down as the caricatures they believe they are. This becomes a problem when your political enemies that you are attacking are the audience itself. With Donald Trump back in office, Hollywood is wasting no time turning every film’s antagonist into a caricature of Donald Trump. As a result, the villains by default are Trump supporters, the same people who just secured the biggest political landslide for Republicans in 35 years.

Are you starting to see the problem? Hollywood creates a movie critiquing everything in society that they don’t like, which is what the majority of their domestic film audience supports. They label it a satire, and then we get films such as Mickey 17.

The film begins with a man named Mickey who finds himself on the wrong end of a loan shark after a failed business idea leaves him in debt to a very dangerous group of people. As a result, Mickey finds himself up to become expendable for a group of people who are looking to create an all-white genetically superior colony led by Kenneth Marshall, an egomaniacal politician who is not a stand-in for Donald Trump.

Being expendable means that Mickey becomes the scientific guinea pig of an organization that uses his body to run several diabolical tests that kill him; however, his body can be reprinted with all of his memories after the fact. When Mickey manages to survive one of his latest missions and ends up with a multiple that was printed before his last body was. Mickey 18 is far more psychopathic than Mickey 17 and has no plans of sharing opportunities with 17.

Mickey 17 is a movie that barely qualifies for being called. There’s not much of a plot here to this film; the film is a stretched-out premise. a guy who can die at will and be brought back due to sci-fi mumbo jumbo. While a premise like this can make for an entertaining movie The film’s objective isn’t to entertain; this is a film that is meant to lecture, and if there’s anything that modern audiences cannot stand, it’s paying hard-earned money to be lectured to.

The film’s objective is to play up left-wing societal fears of capitalism and fascism to make those who frequent MSNBC in the Huffington Post feel like they are watching something that is happening in real life. Bong Joon-ho, who wrote and directed this film, has become a rock star in Hollywood due to his films that found new creative ways and attacked capitalism. While his previous work, such as Snowpiercer and Parasite, has earned him popularity in both Hollywood and North Korea, of all places, Bong is taking his one trick and riding it until the wheels fall off.

The film has about as much subtlety as a brick to the face. The story is focused on colonizing a planet called Niflheim, which sounds very similar to Nephilim. The exposition is led by a racist Christian cult-like leader whose followers wear red hats and treat him as God. Like any good communist uprising, the film at some point divulges into our protagonist leading a revolution against its leader while trying to juggle a romantic subplot that might as well not even be in the movie given how much chemistry the two actors share on screen.

There are too many tonal issues with the film to the point that it never feels balanced at any point. For audiences looking for a more straightforward sci-fi comedy, the movie Never progresses to that point outside of the opening monologue. The movie is too bloated for its own good, pushing a runtime of 2 hours and 20 minutes, and it takes less than 30 minutes to figure out. This is not the film that you were sold in the advertisements.

If there’s any semblance of positivity to be had, Robert Pattinson goes all in in a role where he is the sacrificial lamb of a story that treats him as a joke from start to finish. Patterson, however, does not have the charismatic charm to make audiences turn a blind eye to the other glowing issues with this movie.

Bong is on record saying that he wants to become a writer who writes one screenplay a year that AI could never replicate. However, if this is the type of screenwriting we can expect from human writers, I would expect the total domination of artificial intelligence within the next three years.

Mickey 17 is another example that Hollywood writers need to spend more time in therapy than expect audiences to sit through two and a half hours of their venting session about the problems of society.