The premise is delightfully absurd: a man is sent on an interstellar colonisation mission, doomed to be replaced each time he dies, his consciousness duplicated but never quite the same. The film’s aesthetic is cold yet tactile, placing its existential themes in a realm of tangible struggle.
The spaceship, a tightly controlled and contained environment, functions as the collective consciousness—its rigid hierarchy and utilitarian logic mirroring the structured, rational mind. In contrast, the icy, inhospitable planet stands as a symbolic representation of the unconscious—a space of danger, transformation, and ultimately, transcendence.
Mickey, played with a comic sincerity that recalls the archetypal trickster, is not so much a hero as an accident of persistence. He is both subject and object, a figure at the mercy of larger forces, much like the protagonist of a Voltaire satire or a Swiftian misadventure.
The film’s humour is laced with a sense of inevitability, as Mickey, trapped in an endless cycle of death and rebirth, comes to embody the Jungian process of individuation—not through solitary realisation, but through the interplay of fate, chance, and the actions of those around him.
The story’s emotional core is found in its resolution: Mickey is redeemed not through his own efforts, but through the sacrifices of others. This echoes the Jungian principle that individuation is not an isolated process but a relational one. The shadow—Mickey’s own fragmented, discarded selves—must be reconciled before the self can become whole.
In this, the snow-covered wasteland becomes the final battleground, a liminal space where consciousness and the unconscious meet, where the trickster might yet become the wise fool, the wanderer might find his home.
There is a sincerity to the film that prevents its absurdity from tipping into nihilism. It believes in the redemptive power of connection, even in the face of an indifferent universe. Mickey 17 is a cosmic joke told with conviction, a fable where the impossible is merely the backdrop to a deeper transformation.
Bong Joon-ho has crafted a work that is at once playful and profound, an absurdist odyssey that understands the necessity of laughter in the face of existential dread.
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