2025’s Most Underrated Sci-Fi Blockbuster Just Got A Huge Upgrade

Between Sinners and Mickey 17, 2025 has already provided a hopeful take a look at what blockbusters might appear to be past the period of Marvel-style franchise filmmaking. As an alternative of counting on nostalgia or model recognition, each of those movies are massive, idiosyncratic initiatives that talk to the pursuits and values of their administrators. Like Sinners, Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi comedy Mickey 17 makes essentially the most of a proficient supporting solid (Toni Colette, Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie, Mark Ruffalo), embodying memorably unique characters. Additionally like Sinners, it permits these characters to get sexy; a uncommon high quality lately.

Sadly although, Mickey 17 didn’t obtain a Sinners degree of field workplace success when it got here out this spring.

How Was Mickey 17 Obtained?

Mickey 17’s flop standing could partly be right down to Hollywood’s perennial battle to market cross-genre motion pictures. On this case that meant juggling the status of Bong Joon Ho’s current Oscar win with a follow-up that doesn’t, on the floor, have a lot in frequent with the tense real-world drama of Parasite.

That includes a protagonist who’s principally the alternative of an motion hero, Mickey 17’s tone lands someplace between Starship Troopers and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, starring Robert Pattinson in full gremlin mode. In different phrases, it’s an acquired style. And with the movie’s arrival on 4K this week, now could be an apparent time to amass it.

Why is Mickey 17 Essential to See Now?

As Bong’s third English-language undertaking after Snowpiercer and Okja, Mickey 17 returns to among the director’s favourite recurring themes: anti-capitalist satire, dystopian settings, quirky creatures, and offbeat humor. Primarily based on the novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, it introduces a grim near-future setting the place people have developed a kind of cloning know-how generally known as reprinting. Banned on Earth attributable to moral considerations, it lets individuals 3D print a cloned physique and program it with the unique particular person’s reminiscences, to allow them to successfully die and be reborn many times.

In concept which means that humankind has found immortality, however in follow it ends in a grotesque new type of indentured servitude. Our hapless protagonist Mickey turns into one such “expendable” employee, volunteering for a long-distance house voyage the place he will get all of the dirtiest jobs, repeatedly dying and being reprinted for an additional day of toil. The movie’s title, as you could already know, refers back to the seventeenth reprinting of Mickey, a person who lacks the gumption or self-awareness to battle again in opposition to his punishing circumstances. (Mickey 18 reveals up afterward, gifting us with two Robert Pattinsons taking part in rival doppelgangers with satisfyingly completely different personalities.)

Regardless of the distinction in tone, this state of affairs has lots in frequent with the pitch-black class satire of Parasite. Conceived after the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Mickey 17 provides a brand new dimension to Bong’s longtime curiosity in anti-capitalist commentary, positioning Mickey as a vital employee who’s rendered actually disposable by his callous employers.

With characteristically wealthy and considerate visible worldbuilding, Bong casts Mickey 17’s house voyage as a dystopia inside a dystopia. Mickey is barely right here out of desperation, signing a nightmarish contract to flee a mortgage shark again on Earth. Including insult to harm, he winds up on a ship that’s clearly managed by a cult.

Led by failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his unpleasantly smug spouse Ylfa (Toni Colette), Mickey finds himself onboard a colony mission staffed by true believers. With zero subtlety in anyway, their shipboard tradition is a microcosm of poisonous capitalism, with the Marshalls dwelling in luxurious whereas the riffraff survive on disgusting rations and are compelled to forego intercourse till they arrive at their vacation spot. (Mickey and his girlfriend Nasha, performed by a hilarious Naomi Ackie, flout this rule at each flip.)

There’s an apparent fascist undertone to Marshall’s management, starting along with his plan to repopulate their future settlement with “pure” human infants, and persevering with as we dig additional into the story’s secondary conceit: An alien invasion narrative the place people are the invaders, disrupting a race of big sentient bugs dwelling on their vacation spot planet.

Tapping into Bong’s longtime ardour for monster motion pictures (The Host, Okja), Mickey 17’s alien “Creepers” are without delay alarming and lovable. As a careless and unsympathetic colonizer, Marshall predictably needs to wipe them out. Nevertheless Mickey has cause to imagine that the Creepers are pleasant, introducing an ethical battle that evolves alongside the movie’s central storyline about cloning.

After a run-in with some Creepers the place Mickey 17 is left for useless, the ship’s scientists reprint a brand new physique with out confirming the dying of its predecessor. Quickly Mickey 17 is caught in an undesirable feud along with his extra assured and cynical doppelganger Mickey 18 — a relationship that sparks some deeper commentary about Mickey’s identification as a legally disposable human being.

Leaning into the goofier aspect of political satire, it isn’t essentially a shock that Mickey 17 struggled on the field workplace. Its mixture of blockbuster tropes, wacky performances, bleak political themes and ugly alien gore is undeniably lots to digest. However for those who’ve loved Bong Joon Ho’s earlier work — or certainly Robert Pattinson’s ever-increasing roster of freakazoid roles — then it’s a must-watch.

What New Options And Upgrades Does the Mickey 17 4K Blu-ray Launch Have?

Mickey 17 comes out on 4K Extremely HD Blu-ray on Might 13, together with three featurettes:

• “Behind the Lens: Bong Joon Jo’s Mickey 17,” which covers the movie’s artistic course of with interviews from Bong Joon Ho, Edward Ashton and members of the solid.
• “Mickey 17: A World Reimagined,” exploring the sensible aspect of constructing Mickey 17’s sci-fi setting.
• “The Faces of Niflheim,” which showcases the main characters, including more interviews with the cast and director.

Mickey 17 is available to purchase on 4K Blu-ray now.