
Warning: Light spoilers follow for Mickey 17.
Adaptation is an art and few have made it as wryly fun as Parasite director Bong Joon Ho has with his new film Mickey 17. Though the film follows the broad narrative strokes of Edward Ashton’s similarly darkly playful sci-fi novel Mickey7, and has some of the same questions floating around about the nature of the self, the way Mickey 17 explores broader ideas about love, death, compassion, and violence couldn’t be more different.
Ashton’s story focuses on the perspective of Mickey (perfectly played in the film by a raucous Robert Pattinson at his most wonderfully weird), the titular “expendable” who gets killed and then cloned over and over on a dangerous space-colonizing mission. But that’s only a fraction of what gives the film version life. It’s through an increased focus on the supporting characters that Bong makes the film something he can definitively call his own. Like the central character who finds himself repeatedly replicated, this is no mere carbon copy, but something much more. Just as each of the Mickey copies had slight personality differences, eventually resulting in Mickey 18 being more aggressive, the film too puts its own twist on the novel’s narrative.
Different Planets, Different Deaths, and a Maniacal Expendable
In the book we get a sense of how Mickey was having a hard time back on his original planet of Midgard and needed to escape due to some debts, though this is changed in the film to be Earth. Where Ashton doesn’t give us much of a sense of what life was like on that planet, Bong makes this a focal point, showing how the people fleeing Earth are doing so in order to escape from what has become an increasingly inhospitable world. In both versions, Mickey and his shipmates are trying to set up some sort of beachhead colony on the icy planet of Niflheim. The scene in the movie where Mickey signs up to be an expendable is set against the backdrop of a devastating sandstorm that has become so normalized that people don’t seem to think much of it. In the book, Mickey has no relationship to Earth and Midgard doesn’t have any of the same ecological catastrophes driving people to look to the stars.
Yes, our planet does exist in the novel, but it’s referred to as “old Earth.” Meanwhile, Midgard is “almost a paradise” where people don’t typically have money problems, as nearly everything is automated, from industry to agriculture. Just like other planets in the Union (which includes all the other established colonies), people seem to be doing well. The trouble is that Mickey is not skilled in any real way, which is something the film also establishes. What’s different in the novel is that he likes reading history and does so many times to learn more about what went wrong on a series of ill-fated colony missions. What gets him in trouble is that, while he can survive off a stipend he receives, he is searching for meaning and makes bad money decisions.
This is what brings us to the same element of him becoming an expendable. The first “death” we see (which actually ends up not killing him) is the same in both book and movie, and indeed, most of the ways that Mickey dies in the movie are similar. The primary difference is that there are more of them in the film, and Bong establishes that the repetitive nature of them is what becomes most crushing to the character. The main differences in the book in this regard are some of his early deaths. There is one extended portion devoted to a catastrophe on the ship that Mickey must fix by exposing himself to extreme amounts of radiation. There is a similar scene where he is also exposed to radiation in the film, but this is played more for grim laughs as we see him stranded outside before his hand is severed. The book, on the other hand, traps him inside and sees him even killing himself rather than die a slow painful death that he’ll be forced to remember when he gets reprinted.
The lore surrounding expendables and why doubles (the idea of multiple copies of the same person that becomes a key turning point in both stories) are an almost existential concern for many is deepened in the novel. In Chapter 17, the history buff version of Mickey takes us through the story of Alan Manikova. Though there is a version of this character in the film who becomes a serial killer and created multiple versions of his psychopathic self, the novel explores how he takes over another planet (known as Gault) where he builds an army of multiples. He then blew up a ship sent to see what his intentions were and another planet in the Union, Farhome, decided to launch an unmanned ship at him that would not slow down. Armed with explosives, it obliterated his planet at the speed of light (a la the striking scene from Star Wars: The Last Jedi). So while both the movie and book establish why it is that expendables are feared, the latter makes it clear that it’s because of a greater threat that a double once posed.