By SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie: Mickey-17 is the latest film from the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho whose 2019 socio-commentary, comedy-thriller The Parasite garnered many awards including four Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film) as well as being short-listed for two others, among many other awards, and taking £119 million (US$266m) worldwide at the box office.
SFnally, Bong Joon-ho is known for his first English film Snowpiercer (2013) which, like The Parasite, was also at heart a social commentary. All of which brings us to Mickey 17 (2025).
What’s to be said about Mickey 17? Well, it is firmly an SF film. Additionally, just as Snowpiercer was based on the graphic novel Le Transperceneige (1982), Mickey 17 is based on an early draft of Edward Ashton’s (who he?) novel Mickey 7 (2022): Bong Joon-ho was responsible for the script. Further, like The Parasite, it is also a social commentary again in part on class, but also 21st century dictatorship politics. Also, like a number of Joon-ho’s films, it does markedly change gear over half-way through and ends up being somewhat a different offering by its end: do not let this put you off.
The underlying SF premise is quite simple, space travel and colonising a planet is difficult and can be deadly. However, using unreliable – and illegal on Earth – technology it is possible to download a person’s consciousness and then upload it into a freshly-grown – or in this case ‘printed’ – body. In SF, this is now an established post-human trope and, perhaps notably, featured in a number of Greg Egan’s stories. All well and good, so now onto the plot…
Mickey Barnes (played by Robert Pattison) and his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) owe money to a relentless and sadistic businessman. Knowing that they are likely to be killed in a most excruciatingly horrible way, they decide to join the rush to leave the Earth (it is becoming a ruined planet) and colonise a distant new world. Timo becomes a pilot while Mickey unwittingly signs his life away, but guaranteeing himself a place on the space ship, by becoming an ‘expendable’, someone who is given deadly tasks, who will die and then be resurrected in a newly printed body from recycled organic material while having his mind restored from its last back-up point.
All this is really a MacGuffin as the film is actually about power, those without it and those with it who use it and abuse it. We quickly learn that the ship they are on is destined to an all ‘white’ (snowy) world where the colonists would spread their seed and populate it all under the rule of the quasi-religious politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette).
Having arrived at the colony world, Mickey 17 (16 versions of Mickey having already previously died) falls down a crevasse and is left for dead. A new version of Mickey is printed (Mickey 18), but Mickey 17 eventually makes it back to discover he has another him: an illegal ‘multiple’…
It is at this point the film shifts gear with a focus now shared with that of the stratified ship’s society of Kenneth Marshall with his vision to conquer the planet Niflheim and wipe out its alien, indigenous, animal species. (Though it is pointed out to Marshall that on this world it is we who are the aliens…)
Mickey 17 has a decided art-house feel to it despite its £96 million (US$118m) budget. Also, it has to be said, it is a little clunky in places. The explanatory Mickey commentary some may find off-putting: a lot of folk seem not to like such talk-overs but actually I don’t mind them. The thing that will spring to mind is that the politician Kenneth Marshall is clearly a Donald Trump-like character, this parody is all too obvious, laid on rather thickly and with the subtlety of a miners’ outing, but potential viewers should remind themselves that the film wrapped its shooting well before Trump took office for his second term, his approach to Ukraine, tariff wars with various nations, and his stated aim of annexing Panama, Greenland and Gazza: the film was written and shot under Biden’s US presidency. Having said that, remember Trump previously queried (the sub-titled) Parasite’s, ‘Best Picture’ Oscar win at a campaign rally in Colorado in 2020 (it wasn’t a US film) and this is something that Bong Joon-ho is unlikely to forget.
Despite this being an uneven film, and the SF tropes presented in a flawed way (the ‘it rained on Mongo’ planet being one such example) it is delightfully quirky, and while not polished I prefer this sort of film any day rather than the formulaic franchise films to which we are continually subjected. This is why I enjoy a thoroughly good film programme at an SF convention when we get them (sadly less frequently these days with the new generation of languid conrunners and SMOFs, despite the Glasgow Worldcon’s film poll*): a film that makes you think ‘what was that all about?’ is in no way a bad a thing. Mickey 17 may not be perfect but expect it on the short-lists of some major 2026 SF awards that have film categories!
(*If anyone thinks who am I and that’s a bit harsh, I should perhaps point out that 1970s to early 2000s I was on the committee of several SF conventions and the staff of a few others: all had films screened.)
(1) BRAM STOKER FINAL BALLOT. The Horror Writers Association released the 2024 Bram Stoker Awards Final Ballot today. Click through to see the complete list on File 770.
The BBC’s output of new original and adapted drama has more than halved since 2018 – a cut that amounts to hundreds of lost hours, although precise figures are hard to come by. At a time when interest in audio content has never been higher – the number of existing podcasts is somewhere between 3m and 4m; a hit series is downloaded millions of times a month (The Rest Is History: 29m!) – the BBC’s audio drama output is at an all-time low. As a career radio dramatist, whenever I am gloomily dwelling on this fact, the football phrase “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” comes to mind. Because in this new era of audio storytelling and podcast ubiquity, the BBC’s incredible track record in radio drama should have proved a fabulous advantage. Instead, we are facing the possibility of extinction.
It all began with the 60-minute Friday Play (decommissioned in 2010). This was followed by The Wire (Radio 3) in 2014. The 15-minute drama in Woman’s Hour was lost in 2021. Radio 4’s Friday afternoon play became 30 minutes rather than 45 soon after. Its 60-minute Saturday play – once a weekly event – has been steadily whittled down to 12 new original dramas a year. The latest cut – Radio 3’s Sunday night drama, the UK’s last remaining 90-minute slot – has generated some press, and a petition from the likes of Judi Dench and Ian McKellan, but it is only the latest in a series of losses…
(4) DAVE MCCARTY DISCIPLINED AGAIN. At Chicago’s Capricon earlier this month Dave McCarty reportedly ran an unauthorized room party which led to the loss of his membership. The committee did not respond to File 770’s question about the incident. One person has gone public about it on Bluesky, however.
… Mickey 17, which might best be described as a blackly comic, satirical sci-fi-crime caper. It stars Robert Pattinson as the dopey and desperate Mickey Barnes, who signs up to work a dangerous job on a space-colonising mission, led by a despotic ex-congressman (Mark Ruffalo) and his unhinged wife (Toni Colette). Then, whenever one of Mickey’s assignments results in his death – which is often – he is simply cloned, using “reprinting” technology and sent straight back to work. This is a notion Bong seems to find particularly discomfiting. “Y’know, there’s an HP printer right here in this room, as we’re doing this interview,” he says, eyeing the machine warily. “To think that, like, my head and my arms and legs would just be printed out of this printer, like a piece of paper …”
Rodger B. MacGowan (1948-2025), best known for his wargame art and design, passed away yesterday.1 Most of the memorial posts I’ve seen on social media focus on his later career paths in the board-gaming world. Thus, I thought it would be worthwhile to narrow in on his contribution to science fiction art. After graduating UCLA, where he studied art, motion pictures, and graphic design, MacGowan found work at an advertising agency and an opportunity to create art for one of their accounts, the short-lived Vertex science fiction magazine…
MacGowan’s interior art for part two of William K. Carlson’s “Sunrise West” in Vertex: The Magazine of Science Fiction (December 1974)
A benign quirk of humanity is that we are delighted by things designed to look like other things. A bed shaped like a swan. A sauna shaped like a garlic bulb. A toilet brush shaped like a cherry. The designer Elsa Schiaparelli made fashion history with her acts of surreal mimicry, creating buttons in the form of crickets, a compact that looks like a rotary phone dial, a belt buckle of manicured hands.
The trick is hardly new. Medieval cooks molded pork meatloaf to look like pea pods and massaged sweet almond paste into hedgehogs. No matter the scale or edibility of the object, we’ve always relished a material plot twist — a one-liner in three dimensions.
Inclusion in the category requires design intention, so the “night stand” that is actually a pile of unread books by your bed doesn’t count, no matter how nicely it accommodates a pair of reading glasses and a jar of melatonin gummies. But how about a transistor radio painstakingly designed to mimic a leather-bound book? Or a hand-held lantern shaped like an open volume, complete with marbled exterior and gilt-stamped spine? Or a tiny dust-jacketed “book” with a functional cigarette lighter where the pages ought to be? Yes, yes and yes….
The Wild Robot Original Dialogue Mixer – Ken Gombos Re-Recording Mixer – Leff Lefferts Re-Recording Mixer – Gary A. Rizzo CAS Scoring Mixer – Alan Meyerson CAS Foley Mixer – Richard Duarte
MOTION PICTURES – DOCUMENTARY
Musicby John Williams Production Mixer – Noah Alexander Re-Recording Mixer – Christopher Barnett CAS Re-Recording Mixer – Roy Waldspurger
(9) MARK R. LEEPER OBITUARY. Evelyn C. Leeper announced the death of her husband today, and permitted File 770 to publish the obituary she has written: “Mark R. Leeper (1950-2025)”.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
February 23, 1932 — Majel Barrett Roddenberry. (Died 2008.)
By Paul Weimer: “The First Lady of Star Trek”
Her contributions to Star Trek have been broad and varied. Shall we begin with Majel Barrett Roddenberry as the original Number One in the pilot episode (and seen in “The Menagerie”)? Perhaps having a woman as second in command was too much for 60’s television. So, she became Nurse Chapel and “the voice of the computer” for most of the Star Trek TV series up to her death in 2009.
I didn’t twig until the Next Generation who “that voice was”, when of course she showed up in several episodes as the irrepressible Lwaxana Troi, mother of Counsellor Troi on the Enterprise-D. What could have been a one-note one-time joke character developed into someone with real personality, drive, and spirit under her interpretation of the role. Hearing the computer voice and Lwaxana in the same episode, it finally dawned on me that they were both one and the same. I wound up trying to figure out a headcanon that would explain it, and never quite managed it.
My second favorite small role for her outside of Star Trek has to be as the robotic hard drinking madam of the brothel in the movie Westworld. The movie does have an inconsistency in it thanks to her. We see her swigging drinks from a bottle during the barroom brawl in between the chaos…but later at the end of the movie, when a different robot is offered water, it destroys her. Maybe she was one of the relatively few humans working in the park? (In which case, she probably died during the robot virus uprising). It’s never made absolutely clear, and of course, until they turn murderous, not being able to tell the difference between the robots and humans IS part of the point
But of course, she also appeared in one episode of Babylon 5 as the wife of the now dead Emperor. She has psychic powers and can foresee the future. And Londo, foolish Londo, spends a lot of resources and pull in order to get into her presence and get a prophecy from her. It’s not a great prophecy, and much digital ink was spilled early in the days of the internet trying to interpret just what she meant by her cryptic pronouncements. Oh, and of course announcing that both Vir and Londo would be Emperor.
She passed away in 2008. Requiescat in pace.
Majel Barrett Roddenberry
(11) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Remembering “Our Man Bashir” Episode, Deep Space Nine
Since Amazon now owns the Bond franchise and we know how lovingly they handled the Tolkien franchise, I thought I’d look at the time the writers of Deep Space Nine decided to riff off of James Bond with the “Our Man Bashir” episode in November of 1995 and got in deep shit with one of the holders of that franchise.
So deep that’s it’s been held by fans of the Deep Space Nine that the episode has never been aired after the initial airing as a settlement with one of the producers of a certain film otherwise they would’ve been sued by them. Rest assured that if you go to Paramount+ right now as I did, it’s there with the rest of the Deep Space Nine series.
It was directed by Winrich Kolbe from a story that originated with a pitch from Assistant Script Coordinator Robert Gillan which was turned into a script by Producer Ronald D. Moore.
Although the episode takes its title from Our Man Flint, a major inspiration for the story was the James Bond films. This obvious influence resulted in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer complaining to Paramount about it as they had GoldenEye coming out.
Though why they thought it would affect the success of the film is a mystery as it was the best Pierce Brosnan Bond film and the most successful of his films. And why they were concerned anyways that a SF TV episode would affect the box office of a major film makes no sense at all, does it?
It was well-received at the time and has not been visited by the Suck Fairy which I hold is true of the entire series. Charlie Jane Anders at io9 considers it one of goofiest Deep Space Nine episodes, and Keith DeCandido at Tor.com says “holy crap is it fun”.
From beginning to end, it’s absolutely fun. They sometimes didn’t handle humor wonderfully and as a result it came off as strained not here they had the perfect touch. And remember Bashir does become a secret agent in Section 31 of Trek in the novels though definitely not a Bond-style secret agent.
The dream of mining metals in deep space crashed and burned in the 2010s. AstroForge’s Odin mission to survey a potentially metallic asteroid is packed and ready to lift off.
A private company is aiming to heave a microwave oven-size spacecraft toward an asteroid later this week, its goal to kick off a future where precious metals are mined around the solar system to create vast fortunes on Earth.
“If this works out, this will probably be the biggest business ever conceived of,” said Matt Gialich, the founder and chief executive of AstroForge, the builder and operator of the robotic probe….
How to feel about this lump of rock hurtling towards us at 38,000mph? To pinch from The Simpsons Movie, is it the pub or the church for you? (Faced with catastrophe, the patrons of Moe’s Tavern run from bar to church, while the congregation of the latter sprints in the opposite direction, desperate for a stiff drink.) Most of us will keep calm and carry on, whatever the percentages. Seven years is a long time: you’ll be a size 10 by then – that, or getting divorced.
The key thing about Armageddon is that it’s always in the future, as the followers of myriad cults have found to their cost down the years. Let us trust the experts – remember them? – to sort it out. A few years ago, Nasa significantly changed the orbit of an asteroid. The Dart spacecraft slammed into a 150-metre asteroid moon at speed, changing its orbital period by more than 30 minutes – a result that could be replicated, if planning began now.
A few, should the predictions get worse, may go full survivalist, filling their bunkers with tinned carrots. But their number will be small. The news cycle is hardly relaxing at the moment, the old order as frangible as digestive biscuits. A person has the capacity for only so much terror, and now may not be the time to start worrying what will happen to Birmingham if YR4 turns out to be West Midlands-bound.
The year 1998 came with its share of global calamities, but the notion of a world war seemed far away compared with today, which may be one reason why two big films about asteroids then played to packed cinemas.
In Deep Impact, a comet on a collision course with Earth hits, causing a tsunami that destroys the US east coast, a mission by the Messiah spacecraft having failed to alter its path. In Armageddon, a rogue asteroid is broken into fragments by a nuclear bomb that is somehow inserted into it by, among others, an oil driller played by Bruce Willis – though it’s not all good news: Shanghai is obliterated by another meteor strike along the way. No prizes for guessing which film did better at the box office….
(15) A BITING WIND. The “Author Forecast: Weather Worth Reading Kickstarter”, which offers “your local weather told using quotes from books”, is taking pledges through February 28. (But it’s a done deal – they’ve already raised 20 times their target amount.)
I wish I could say how many sff quotes are in the mix – this one from Dracula is alone among the samples shown in the publicity. You might find the product amusing anyway!
Wednesday Addams’ preference for the color black has often been an important character trait in Addams Family adaptations, with Wednesday taking this quality to the next level as Jenna Ortega’s iteration requires a black substitute for Nevermore Academy’s purple uniform. Both Wednesday and Catherine Zeta-Jones’ Morticia wore only black throughout season 1 to pay homage to their characters’ iconic styles from past franchise entries, but Wednesday season 2 is making some adjustments to the Addams’s color palettes. Not only is Pugsley donning Nevermore’s purple jacket, but Morticia is seen wearing a dress that breaks away from her black-clad franchise history.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Daniel Dern, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
