Mickey 17 Is a Sci-Fi Dystopian Movie About Male Disposability

Thanks to Korean director Bong Joon-Ho, Hollywood finally notices the downsides of life as a man.

"Bong Joon-ho and Robert Pattinson in South Korea for 'Mickey 17'" by 티비텐 is licensed under CC BY 3.0.

I’ve long thought that Korea’s Bong Joon-Ho is one of the best directors in the world, and in 2020 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally agreed with me when it handed Parasite an Oscar for Best Picture.

That movie was about how the reality of social class in South Korea drives the rich and poor alike to absurd behavior as part of the rat race. It struck a chord not only in the Far East — where middle class students crowd over books from sunup to sundown in the hopes of getting admitted to the best schools and top firms — but across the Western world as well, where class inequality has been a pressing issue in recent years.

Joon-Ho’s latest film, Mickey 17, is about a different kind of inequality: the inequality between men and women. But unlike the many films that have (justifiably) explained the downsides of life as a woman, Mickey 17 does something novel for Hollywood: it admits that life as a man isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.

The film’s protagonist is Mickey Barnes (played by Robert Pattison). Barnes and his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) find themselves owing money to a dangerous guy, so they end up jettisoning the planet into outer space. They join a space mission led by an eccentric ex-Congressman Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) that aims to colonize a distant frozen planet.

Barnes is crucial to the mission because he’s what’s called an “expendable.” He can die and then be reconstructed by a machine which will carry his consciousness into a new body an infinite number of times.

At first glance, this sounds awesome. Barnes doesn’t have to settle for a cat-like nine lives, he has unlimited lives. In a way, he’s sort of superhuman.

But the life of an expendable isn’t any grander than what the title makes it seem. Barnes is sent into the most dangerous situations and dies a series of very painful deaths. He’s dismembered, exposed to horrible diseases, and in general treated as if he’s disposable.

One way to look at this is that he’s disposable because he’s indebted. Joon-Ho’s films have always been class conscious and deeply suspicious of large corporations in particular.

But Mickey 17 isn’t subtle about its gendered commentary. We never see any female expendables in the movies. And when Marshall finds that a female crew member is tragically killed during an expedition, he explodes at Barnes, telling him that she was capable of fertility and therefore she had more worth.

This is the evolutionary calculus that has created male disposability. Men, who are generally stronger and more capable of hard labor, were historically the ones called upon to do things like hunt or fight wars while women needed to be protected in order to ensure that the community survives. Men, after all, can’t bear children.

But as is often the case with evolutionary traits brought into the modern world, these gendered expectations often become more constraining than common sense.

In a country that is transitioning to a knowledge economy, men are falling behind in every arena from academics to labor force participation, something the Democratic Party is finally starting to recognize after losing the male vote in election after election.

Yes, women are often mistreated by men in all kinds of cruel ways. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend watching the 2022 horror satire Fresh, which is now streaming on Hulu. The movie humorously and darkly portrays the kind of risks women face when meeting male romantic interests, and you’d have to have your head in the sand to deny the realities satirized in the film.

But that doesn’t mean that male disposability isn’t a real thing. Just as Barnes is sent out to the most dangerous missions and given lectures about how he’s really not worth anything, men across the world continued to be tasked with the most dangerous work and are often treated like they’re privileged, whiny brats if they ever point out that being a man can, at times, really suck.

If you care about male rates of suicide, homelessness, workplace injury and death, you aren’t anti-woman. There doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game between men and women; it’s possible to care about both groups at the same time.

I’m glad to see Joon-Ho finally broaching this taboo topic in Hollywood. Although I didn’t think Mickey 17 was quite on par with Snowpiercer, The Host, Parasite, or Okja in cinematic quality — the movie is a bit bloated and could probably have shaved off half an hour in editing — it is just as irreverent in those films, just in a slightly different direction.