Mickey 17: An exercise in futile philosophical questions

Last night I watched Mickey 17 with my family, and I have a few thoughts about it.

First, if you just want my opinion on the movie, I thought it was pretty good. It's not a flawless and unimprovable movie or anything, but I give it a solid 8/10. There will be heavy spoilers ahead so if you've been considering watching it, go watch it now, then come back when you're done. If you haven't, I'll try to make this still readable.

The fundamental innovation in this sci-fi world is human printing technology. If someone dies, you can just reprint them, then reupload all of their memories to the new body, and they're good as new. Mickey's job is an expendable, someone whose job is to do dangerous acts with the expectation of dying just so they can be reprinted. Of course, there are a lot of problems that come with printing technology. Alan Manikova was one of the researchers who developed this technology, and printed copies of himself so he could have an alibi for his serial murder habit. As a result, a rule was established that any "multiples" would result in total elimination of all offenders. You might already be able to find a problem with this rule. Human printing was also banned on Earth, but this takes place on a ship headed to a new planet and on that new planet, so this (in my opinion) very reasonable restriction does not apply.

Another interesting problem is the pretty obvious "is it moral to kill volunteers as long as we can just keep bringing them back to life?" I personally don't find a huge problem with this as long as they aren't basically torturing them, but they do perform various forms of torture on them. Mickey is injected with things for vaccine development, sure, but also when he's injured they have him do things like "remove your glove in space so we can see what happens to your skin" and "nerve gas testing" before they reprint him. I'm not sure if it's optional to remember your extremely painful deaths either. They say at one point that you have to back up your memories weekly but they also imply that he does remember how he dies.

Additionally, the main conflict of the movie is about Mickey 18 being printed after Mickey 17 is left for dead but survives. This leads to another extremely interesting question: If you're created as a multiple through no fault of your own, are you responsible for this? Who is? What happens if a multiple is made by accident? If a multiple is made, now if you die, are you just dead or do you continue to live on through the multiple or are you just dead now? Does this shatter the illusion that each reprint is just a continuation of your own life, and that each version is in reality just an entirely new person after the previous one's death?

I am glad to report that to all these complicated philosophical questions, the movie... does not even attempt to answer any of them! That's right, this movie introduces all of these complicated questions and then completely punts on all of them. And I'm happy about that. First, addressing these questions would have ruined the pacing and the runtime. Putting a philosophy lecture into a black comedy isn't really a great idea. Second, this isn't what the movie is about. The movie is about a charismatic but idiotic politician who only cares about his image fleeing a planet closing in on him/not profitable enough for him and starting his own country, and how his crew responds to this as they realize what a prick he is. And while how he treats the expendable Mickey is a decent part of what leads to his downfall, these philosophical questions are not. These questions are actually completely detached from the plot, and that's fine. The story wraps up nicely as well without ever having to answer any of these questions, and while one could look at this narrative convenience as a flaw, I think that it's actually a strength of the movie. It lets the viewer draw their own conclusions, or agree with the writer that as long as we don't have this tech in the real world, we don't really need to worry about it.

Some final thoughts about the movie itself that are disconnected from this very small slice of the movie that I have taken a look at (seriously if this movie sounds interesting to you, stop reading this article and go watch the movie before I spoil it or ruin your viewing experience):

• Kai was overdeveloped in act 2 for basically not showing up at all in the 3rd act and that kinda made it drag in the middle a little bit and made me wonder where the movie was going, but they did manage to wrap it all up nicely IMO. This overdevelopment is one of the few things that docked the score for me.

• C3 was a funny joke but it felt in the moment that the iPad didn't get enough screen time for it to actually set up the joke, I didn't even notice any writing on it the first time.

• In general I found the movie to be very funny and a good time. There was a lot of sex in it but I didn't find it distasteful to watch with my mom (this sort of thing has happened before (story for another time)).

• 18's death felt very natural as a conclusion to his arc. In general I really liked how he was set up as a character and he paid off well. Another unanswered question is how much of the nature of these clones is due to the personality upload and how much is due to their development and early experiences (or just randomness), and I don't really need this question either.

• Close to the end of the movie, it feels like Ruffalo is doing a Trump impression for all of his lines and I kinda didn't like that. I thought he sounded fine before and it was weird for him to suddenly sound like a different, specific real life person. The movie is supposed to be allegory and this was a weird deviation from that.

• There was one point where someone had a google-glasses style recording cam, and it has 47% battery but only had a sliver of battery left on the overlay. That really bugged me for some reason.

Anyway, that's it. Thanks for indulging me in my weird rant about this movie.