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Mickey Barnes and Timo join an expedition to the planet Niflheim, hoping to outrun a murderous loan-shark. The hapless Mickey signs up as an "Expendable", not realising this means he will have his memories uploaded to a computer and then be made to do all sorts of hazardous work, getting cloned/printed afresh every time he dies. He rapidly makes his way up to Mickey 17 before being abandoned in an ice ravine...
The expedition is led by a feeble but egotistical white supremacist whose followers (who make up a sizeable chunk of the expedition crew) wear red hats; and that is about as subtle as the politics of this film gets. It has a number of Points To Make, and it does so with some vigour.
A bunch of the plot doesn't hold up if you look at it hard ; for instance - who has their C&C centre in the middle of the waste recycling bit of the ship? On a resource-constrained ship, surely you'd treat the expendable as expensive enough to take care not to let him fall out of the printer on the floor? If they have all that telemetry on the expendable to be able to monitor them dying in space, surely they'd notice they'd not died in the ice ravine? Why choose to maybe-poison the expendable at dinner with the big boss, when you could just do it in the lab? etc., and sometimes the plot was deeply predictable like when they made a big thing of the not-closed cabin door, you knew that someone was going to come in and catch the three of them in flagrante. There were bits that were too cringey for me, but I have abnormally low tolerance for cringe.
But I think my main problem with Mickey 17 was that I didn't find myself caring about the plot very much - something about the whole thing kept breaking my suspension of disbelief, and I found myself thinking "this is a very silly movie" rather than getting caught up in what was happening. Possibly because too many of the characters' choices seemed inexplicable? Anyhow, my least liked of the Hugo films this year so far (and there's only 1 left).
The expedition is led by a feeble but egotistical white supremacist whose followers (who make up a sizeable chunk of the expedition crew) wear red hats; and that is about as subtle as the politics of this film gets. It has a number of Points To Make, and it does so with some vigour.
A bunch of the plot doesn't hold up if you look at it hard ; for instance - who has their C&C centre in the middle of the waste recycling bit of the ship? On a resource-constrained ship, surely you'd treat the expendable as expensive enough to take care not to let him fall out of the printer on the floor? If they have all that telemetry on the expendable to be able to monitor them dying in space, surely they'd notice they'd not died in the ice ravine? Why choose to maybe-poison the expendable at dinner with the big boss, when you could just do it in the lab? etc., and sometimes the plot was deeply predictable like when they made a big thing of the not-closed cabin door, you knew that someone was going to come in and catch the three of them in flagrante. There were bits that were too cringey for me, but I have abnormally low tolerance for cringe.
But I think my main problem with Mickey 17 was that I didn't find myself caring about the plot very much - something about the whole thing kept breaking my suspension of disbelief, and I found myself thinking "this is a very silly movie" rather than getting caught up in what was happening. Possibly because too many of the characters' choices seemed inexplicable? Anyhow, my least liked of the Hugo films this year so far (and there's only 1 left).