When the first footage for the upcoming sci-fi flick “Mickey 17” was revealed back in April at CinemaCon, attendees were quick to ridicule star Robert Pattinson’s nasally New York accent and the oddball tone of Oscar-winning director Bong Joon Ho’s (“The Host,” “Snowpiercer”) latest Hollywood project.
After a five-month wait, Warner Bros. finally released “Mickey 17’s” debut trailer, and we can now see and hear for ourselves what all the commotion is about — and it’s not nearly as bad as rumored!
The film is adapted from Edward Ashton’s quirky 2022 novel “Mickey7,” whose plot is described as “The Martian” meets “Multiplicity” and revolves around an Expendable human worker drone named Mickey who toils away on the icy planet of Niflheim. When Mickey7 tumbles into a deep crevasse, he’s listed as dead, and a fresh Expendable called Mickey8 is churned out as his replacement. However, Mickey7 is rescued by one of the world’s native creatures, and, when he appears back at the colony HQ, he discovers that the new clone has now taken over his old life.
With both of their existences threatened, Mickey7 and Mickey8 need to work together to avoid detection by their corporate overlords while Niflheim’s centipede-like aliens become restless in the inhospitable environment and a conflict mounts that could mean danger to both species.
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Here’s the film’s official synopsis:
“From the Academy Award-winning writer/director of ‘Parasite,’ Bong Joon Ho, comes his next groundbreaking cinematic experience, ‘Mickey 17.’ The unlikely hero, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), has found himself in the extraordinary circumstance of working for an employer who demands the ultimate commitment to the job … to die, for a living.”
“The number is the number of times he dies. I killed him 10 times more,” Bong Joon Ho told CinemaCon fans in April as the initial footage screened. “It’s a sci-fi movie, but it’s a human story.”
Arriving in theaters in the new year, “Mickey 17” stars Robert Pattinson (“The Batman,” “Tenet”), Naomi Ackie (“Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker”), Steven Yeun (“Nope”), and Academy Award nominees Toni Collette (“Hereditary”) and Mark Ruffalo (“Poor Things”). It’s produced by Dede Gardner (“Moonlight,” “12 Years a Slave”), Jeremy Kleiner (“Moonlight,” “12 Years a Slave”), Bong Joon Ho and Dooho Choi (“Okja,” “Snowpiercer”). Executive producers on the upcoming film are Brad Pitt, Jesse Ehrman, Peter Dodd and Marianne Jenkins.
“This book came about in certain stages,” Ashton told Space.com in a 2022 interview. “I wrote a short story a number of years ago that explored the idea of saving your consciousness and after you’re killed, be regenerated, and in that way have a sort of crappy immortality as I describe it.”
Warner Bros. Pictures’ “Mickey 17” lands in theaters on Jan. 31, 2025.
