The following review of Mickey 17 contains spoilers.

Bong Joon-ho’s new sci-fi/action/comedy film Mickey 17 stars Robert Pattinson as Mickey Barnes, a man whose debt on Earth sends him fleeing to space as part of a planetary colonization mission led by bumbling oligarch Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his sauce-loving wife Ylfa (Toni Collette). To secure his position onboard, Mickey becomes an Expendable, a person whose memory is uploaded to a brick and who can be “reprinted” in a new body every time he dies. Day after day, Mickey is tasked with the brutal work of dying. He is a living lab rat, an eternal labor. He is the ultimate fantasy of the carceral system, because what are the imprisoned people tasked with fighting LA’s wildfires if not expendable in society’s eyes?

Yes, in typical Bong Joon-ho fashion, many of the evils of capitalism come under fire in the film. It traffics in some of the prominent critiques across his canon, including imperialism, class stratification, and critiques of big agriculture. It takes big swings, and while not all of them hit perfectly, Mickey 17‘s heavy-handed skewering of capitalism and colonialism has a lot more bite to it than a lot of recent dystopian science-fiction. I’m most interested in the film’s portrayal and critique of our society’s obsession with death. Yes, extractive capitalism is violent, as we see many times over in the film. But it’s more than just violent; it creates a culture of death obsession while also normalizing mass death. We see this death obsession manifest in many folds of the film: from the serial killer who brutally murders homeless people, to the loan shark who accepts repayments in the form of observing people die by dismemberment, to the gleeful disposition of the scientists running lethal experiments on Mickey, to the way everyone asks Mickey what dying feels like.

The film centers its titular Mickey 17 — that is, the 17th copy of Mickey Barnes — who returns from a mission alive to find he has already mistakenly been reprinted as Mickey 18. They’ve become Multiples, even more condemned than Expendables. Multiples are an abomination, and the law mandates they be permanently deleted (executed) on the spot. There are multiple potential queer and trans readings that can be applied to Mickey 17, especially when it comes to the subjugation and categorization of Multiples as “crimes against nature.” But one also doesn’t have to look toward subtext to find queerness in Mickey 17, because there are also textually queer characters!

Anamaria Vartolomei plays Kai Katz, a soldier part of Marshall’s military. (Marshall’s company is also a religion is also a government that operates, fittingly, under martial law.) From the moment she’s introduced, it’s clear she’s in a relationship with fellow space agent Jennifer Chilton (Ellen Robertson). While on a mission on the icy planet they plan to colonize, Jennifer is killed. Later, when Mickey enters Kai’s room, we see pictures of her with Jennifer decorating her mirror. Kai wants to know, as so many do, how Mickey feels when he dies. She wants to know what Jennifer felt in the end. Kai then leans in to try to kiss Mickey, who retracts. He’s in a monogamous relationship with the woman he considers his soulmate: Nasha (Naomi Ackie, who I need to star in a million more action films STAT), another soldier. At the end of the film, Kai is in a relationship with a new unnamed woman with a shaved head.

A bi woman who is pretty much only into women and Robert Pattinson? Yeah, I’ve met many of them!!! I’ve met many lesbians who would identify as “only into women and Robert Pattinson.” They are legion!

Jokes aside, I’m interested in how Kai’s queerness does and does not impact the narrative of Mickey 17. Mickey and Kai are at one point invited to dine with the depraved and absolutely horny-for-each-other Marshall and Ylfa. During the dinner, both Marshall and Ylfa remark that Kai is a perfect female specimen, the exact kind of woman they see aligned with their “sexpedition.” Sex is discouraged onboard the spaceship, as everyone is expected to conserve calories before they’re able to set up their new society on the icy planet they’re colonizing. But once that society is established? Marshall and Ylfa wants everyone to get down to fucking. Kai, they think, represents the heteronormative platonic ideal of a woman. It’s ironic, then, that she’s actually queer and therefore does not align with their vision of a perfect society. This divergence never really comes up though. Kai does reply to the couple’s creepy praise with: “Am I just a uterus to you?” But when they repeatedly refer to Jennifer as her “friend,” she does not correct them.

On the one hand, I am drawn to the subtlety of the storytelling here. On the other, it’s difficult to accept that subtlety when the rest of the film is so in-your-face. Sure, varying levels of subtlety/obviousness and literal/metaphorical can enhance a film like this, but that’s not quite the effect of the downplayed nature of Kai’s sexuality. Especially because it is a very sexual film! Which is one of its strengths! When Nasha discovers there are two Mickeys, her instinct isn’t to turn them in as Multiples but rather to use them for her own sexual pleasure. Mickey 18 is even seemingly into the idea of doppelbänging his counterpart. Nasha and Mickey 17’s sexual hunger for each other is so pronounced it even becomes a plot point near the end of the film.

So why, then, is the relationship between Kai and Jennifer portrayed with such paltry passion, all emotion post-Jennifer’s death and completely disconnected from the sexual fervor its other characters exhibit? In a film that hits you over the head with all its cultural critiques, why does queerness and a disruption to the heteronormative world order take up so little space? All it would have taken was a line or two during that dinner scene to really bring it all together, but that’s where Mickey 17 wavers in its execution across the board, presenting a lot of threads at once without really weaving them together as capably as most of Bong Joon-ho’s work. It’s like Mickey 17 is trying to do two opposing things: establishing a queernormative world where Kai’s sexuality doesn’t matter that much while also placing these characters in an incredibly restrictive environment that looks a whole lot like the heteropatriarchal and white supremacist contexts that have this country in a chokehold. The film’s relationship to race is similarly cloudy: Marshall speaks of creating an all-white society, but he’s seemingly referring to the whiteness of the literal planet and not the people he has brought along, who span races. (Meanwhile, it’s clear Kai’s whiteness indeed is an unspoken part of why he and Ylfa consider her a perfect woman.) It’s Mickey — a white and, for the most part, straight man — who becomes the stand-in for the most subjugated populations of society.

Ultimately, I do like the film and respect the risks it takes, the strangeness of its humor. The performances are fantastic. But I’m left wondering why queerness was injected in such a clear way without it being, well, actually explicit. It’s such a bold, adventurous, scream of a film, but its queerness ends up dampened.

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