How Bong Joon-ho made ‘Mickey 17’ the first Trump 2.0 movie

The premise of the book and the movie are somewhat identical. Sometime in the future, cloning technology takes off and is quickly corporatized, resulting in workers on the lowest rungs of the class ladder becoming quite literally disposable and replaceable. For instance: Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), who signs up for one such position to pay off his debts, resulting in him being given dangerous odd-jobs and even experimented upon with viruses and lethal radiation. Each time he dies, he’s simply replaced with an identical clone of himself, spat out by a jittery bio-printer. However, when he’s presumed dead on an exploratory mission down an ice cavern, and left for dead by his best friend, his miraculous survival leads to complications, when it turns out he’s already been cloned and re-awakened back at the high-tech colony. For reasons both complicated and convenient, two copies of the same person existing simultaneously is a major no-go, forcing the two Mickeys—numbers 7 and 8 in the book, but 17 and 18 on screen—to work together to maintain the ruse.

The most interesting facets of Mickey 17 are owed to its divergences from the source material, which become clear from the opening scene. While identical to the book’s opening chapter, the apparent demise of the meek Mickey 17 down an ice chute plays out with one key difference. In the book, his best friend Berto weighs the pros and cons of trying to rescue Mickey from a seemingly impossible scenario, and after some agonizing and negotiating, decides to let him die. In the movie, his best friend Timo (Steven Yeun) readily lets him rot in a shallow grave, where saving him would’ve been an easy option. What’s more, he does this with a smile on his face, despite his comforting language, setting up Mickey 17 as a darkly hilarious mirror to Ashton’s novel.

There are other changes along the way, concerning minor plot points and major parts of the premise, like how the clones’ personalities differ—much more so in the movie—and the techniques by which their memories are preserved and updated between iterations. The book goes into much more detail, while the movie hand-waves it for convenience. However, the tone is mainly where the two diverge. Bong’s version of the story is deeply farcical, and buoyed by jet-black humor steeped in irreverent meanness, leading to some major remixing of the movie’s key antagonist, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo).

Where Marshall is simply a colony administrator in the book—an incidental roadblock to the two Mickeys maintaining their ruse—he’s a colorful, cartoonish politician in the movie (and a failed politician at that). Bong’s political satire has always been overt and caricatured in his English-language movies (see also: Tilda Swinton’s Thatcher-esque Minister Mason in Snowpiercer, and Jake Gyllenhaal’s wild-eyed TV personality Johnny Wilcox in Okja). The same is true for Marshall, a dandy political upstart with bright white veneers, whose sycophant wife Ylfa (Toni Colette) is obsessed with gourmet sauces. It’s all about appearances for the Marshalls, whose accepting language disguises sinister white nationalist undertones, and who are not-so-secretly in bed with a combination conglomerate/mega-church—sly commentary about the interests that truly pull the strings in the modern United States.

What’s more, Marshall’s supporters don bright red baseball caps with political slogans written across them, an obvious nod to President Donald Trump. There’s even a scene where an assassination attempt results in a bullet grazing Marshall’s cheek, though this was written and filmed well before the real-world attempt on Trump’s life back in July, which most audiences are likely to think of. Either way, Marshall’s wild gesticulations speak to an unsubtle shot at the returning U.S. commander-in-chief, while the character’s erratic behavior and space-faring mission might bring to mind the exploits of his key advisor, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

Given the movie’s initial March 2024 release date, some of these real-world similarities are serendipitous, but they speak to just how dialed-in Bong’s satire is when it comes to American politics. The characters in Mickey 17 thoroughly blur the line between evil and idiocy, resulting in a truly feel-bad comedy. Even Mickey 18, an ostensible hero based on the book’s more straight-laced Mickey 8, is a downright psychotic version of Mickey Barnes, which not only allows Pattinson the chance to flex his comedic muscles, but brings into stark focus what living in a capitalist hellscape does to these characters’ psyches.

Between a more gleefully selfish version of Mickey’s best friend, and a delightfully violent version of his girlfriend Nasha (Naomie Ackie), each character in Bong’s searing adaptation seems to have been driven to the brink of madness a mere 50 years from now. The timeline here is another key change: Mickey7 is set several centuries in the future, when the Earth is but a distant memory, and Mickey Barnes hails from an Earth-like colony. Instead, Bong tethers his versions of Ashton’s characters—who hail from Earth as we know it—more directly to our reality, and to our contemporary political milieu, as though we were already teetering on the edge of madness, and simply waiting for a ludicrous scenario like Mickey 17 to present itself before going full-tilt, thanks to fascist forces fueled by religious fervor and corporate frenzy. The sci-fi reality Bong concocts may not be so far off.