Robert Pattinson Doubles Down on the Art of Dying

Robert Pattinson is dead. Robert Pattinson is reborn. He hath risen! Rinse, repeat.

Like a Looney Tunes cartoon penned by Philip K. Dick, Mickey 17 — filmmaker Bong Joon Ho‘s long-awaited follow-up to his 2019 masterpiece Parasite — takes a technological breakthrough and runs its human lab rat of a hero through a gauntlet of future-shocked banality and brutality. In the early 2050s, mankind has figured out how to clone bodies and carry over a single consciousness. When we meet Pattinson’s Mickey Barnes, this copied-to-death Candide has already gone through a number of iterations and is about to shuffle off this mortal coil once again. Awaiting his latest fate in an ice cave filled with alien creatures, he fills us in on the backstory: On Earth, Barnes and his best friend Timo (Steven Yeun) found themselves in a mobster’s crosshairs. An opportunity to join a colony of interstellar pioneers on a four-years-and-change journey to a brave new world seems like a good way for them to get out of a jam. Problem solved.

Except Mickey is… well, he’s not that bright. He signed up to be an “Expendable,” the most dangerous gig on the ship. When scientists want to observe what happens after the human body is exposed to fatal amounts of radiation, when a vaccine is needed for a virus that causes people to vomit blood, when a new nerve gas needs to be researched, it’s Mickey’s time to clock in and bleed out. Dying in the most horrific manner possible is his business, and business is booming. All of his memories have been uploaded to a brick-like hard drive, however, so once his corpse is dumped into the molten waste-disposal incinerator, Mickey is simply “reprinted” into another body made out of recycled compost. Voila! He can go back to having loads of sex with his girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a soldier who’s also along for the ride, until he’s once again called upon to be gassed, gutted, broiled, battered, and basically treated like a flesh-and-blood crash-test dummy.

Adapting Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7 and upping the number of Mickeys slipped into the mix, Bong spends the first half of the film setting up the central idea behind the book — what the author called “crappy immortality… coupled with an exploitative social structure.” Class structures have always been this Oscar winner’s underlying concern, whether he’s tackling serial-killer procedurals (Memories of Murder), monster movies (The Host), maternal mysteries (Mother) or social satires sharp enough to cut bone (Parasite). Mickey may not have been at the bottom of the economic ladder — he did once open a macaroon shop, it just didn’t quite become the Magnolia Bakery of his dreams. But after signing his present and future lives away, this holy fool is at the mercy of his benefactors. He’s found himself at the ass end of the ship’s sociological food chain, stuck in an infinite-fodder position he accepts with a resigned shrug. Count how many times people refer to Mickey as “meat.” Add in Mickey’s own use of the term to describe himself, and that number doubles.

Bong’s covered this specific patch of scorched earth before, complete with a dingy aesthetic, dystopian vibe, and doomsday-hour dark humor. His 2013 film Snowpiercer was another tale of haves and have-nots taken to fantastic, violent, and thrilling extremes. Like that movie, Mickey 17 also features an over-the-top villain that allows an actor license to ham, and counts a real-life political figure as its inspiration. Tilda Swinton said she based that earlier work’s matronly minister partially on Margaret Thatcher. This new film gives us Mark Ruffalo as a boorish politician named Kenneth Marshall, who manipulates his cult-like followers — why yes, they do wear red hats! — into following him into the cosmos, with the final frontier being a “white planet” perfect for his dual goals of racial purity and I-alone-can-fix-it messiah worship. Feel free to guess who he might be loosely based upon. All we know is the mention of him colonizing space because “he lost his last two elections” immediately earmarks this as escapism.

To call the actor’s take on this odious avatar of populism run amok “ridiculous” doesn’t begin to adequately communicate how grating not just the character but the tone of his performance is, or point out where this attempt to send up our absurd, end-times moment seriously fumbles. Look, we stan an outrageous Ruffalo — his goofy Lothario in Poor Things felt like a revelation after seeing him play superheroes, sincere heroes, and a million moody Brando types. Yet every time his delusional dumbfuck of a fascist shows up, it’s the equivalent of a thousand record-needle scratches. He’s got the cacophony right, but it’s completely in the wrong key with the film as a whole. Add in his pairing with Toni Collette‘s grande dame of a wife, who seems to be an ill-advised mash-up of Hilary, Melania, and Mrs. Macbeth, and you have the makings of one extended, cringeworthy joke that consistently drags the proceedings down.

Luckily, Pattinson manages to keep things buoyant without diluting the late-capitalism metaphors or the melancholy existentialism. He’s also why the second half of Mickey 17 works twice as strong as the first. The former heartthrob is now deep into his wild-card phase as the 21st century’s primo screen weirdo, leveraging his handsomeness and charisma in order to sell bolder, batshit character idiosyncrasies. Which means you get to stare at Mickey’s gorgeous Easter Island mug while listening to him speak in a nasal, dude-where’s-my-car accent that somehow makes this poor sad sack sympathetic instead of simply pathetic. In space, no one can hear you scream, but everybody can definitely hear you whine. And even before you get to see Pattinson go full Gumby-limbed and prove that he’s as skilled a slapstick comedian as he is a smoldering sex symbol, he constructs an every-schlub who seems weighed down by penance (a childhood accident makes him feel like this endless cycle of death is well-earned punishment) as he stumbles from one grisly demise to the next. His Mickey is the ultimate beaten-down beta. Then we get to meet his alpha counterpart.

Back to that introduction: Mickey No. 17 had been considered a goner, left to die in that ice cave on the planet Niflheim (Norse mythology scholars, mark your bingo cards). Only, the mutant pill bugs who call the place home aren’t going to eat him. They turn out to be interstellar versions of the cute critter at the center of Bong’s fairy tale Okja (2017), and collectively muscle him back up to the surface in the spirit of inter-species friendship. Returning to the base, he crawls into his bed — and discovers another Mickey already in place. Assuming 17 had perished, the powers that be proactively printed out Mickey No. 18, who turns out to be a far more aggressive version of the original. “Multiples,” as in two simultaneously existing copies, are highly illegal. But two Mickeys will come in handy when Marshall engages in authoritarian military cosplay, an act of cruelty pits the colonists against the aliens, and mutually assured destruction needs to be averted unless 17 can broker a detente.

Even the least narcissistic actors love to play scenes against themselves; it’s a challenge that ranks up there with portraying iconic singers and IRL-tragedy survivors. Mileage often varies on the results, but Pattinson takes on the responsibility of embodying both dueling Mickeys with the same dedication to crazy-like-a-fox choices that he displayed in his turn as Batman. You not only get a definite sense of the contradictory nature of these multiples, with the actor leaning even further into 17’s dopiness and lending a dangerous edge to 18’s volatile sociopath; watch both of them argue over who deserves to live, navigate the brink of a disaster, or engage in a brief ménage à trois with Ackie’s thrilled, horny warrior, and you momentarily forget you’re watching the same guy. That’s not just a filmmaking trick. That’s a flexing of talent.

And it’s Pattinson’s performance(s), toggling between light and pitch black, that really keep Mickey 17 from being crushed under its own bulk. Bong is a consummate cinematic craftsman, virtually incapable of creating a dull frame. What’s happening within those impeccable compositions, however, feels like its suffering from an overabundance of business and undernourished storytelling. Pattinson cuts through all of it, one hangdog expression and mouth-breather exclamation at a time. Add in a second R-Patz who snarls his lines while staring at his predecessor with a shark’s eyes, and voila! Welcome to the Robert 1 and Robert 2 Show.

From Rolling Stone US.