MICKEY 17

Bong Joon Ho can clearly make an exciting, weird, funny science-fiction movie — the bones of a good one are here. A man who dies and gets reprinted into a new clone every time is a genuinely fun premise, and the film has fun with it.

But the movie isn't content to entertain. It builds its villain — the leader of the whole colonizing expedition — as a disgraced, bombastic Christian politician clearly modeled on Donald Trump, and plays him so broadly that the satire curdles into contempt. The result attacks capitalism and Christians alike, wraps that attack in abundant f-words, strong violence, and lewd content, and asks you to laugh along.

That's a lot to ask of a Christian viewer, and it's not a fair trade for the fun parts. Skip it.

Mickey Barnes is broke, in debt to a loan shark, and out of options on Earth. So he signs up for a colonizing expedition to a distant ice planet — without reading the fine print. He's just become an "expendable": every time a deadly task kills him, his mind and memories are downloaded into a freshly cloned body. Leading the expedition is Kenneth Marshall, a disgraced, bombastic politician and religious fanatic who sounds a lot like a certain former U.S. president. That's where we'll leave it.

Three stars means real craft with real problems. The premise is inventive, and the film is often exciting, comical, and weird in the fun sense — Bong Joon Ho knows how to build a strange world and keep it moving.

The trouble is the villain. Mark Ruffalo plays the Christian politician so over-the-top — complete with a hammy Trump impression and scenes of pseudo-Christian hymn-singing — that he becomes a cartoon rather than a threat. A story that wants you to take it seriously shouldn't make its main antagonist this clownish; it undercuts the film's own credibility. Add abundant profanity that reads as a substitute for sharper writing, and you get a movie whose imagination outpaces its script.

This is a humanist, implied-Marxist film with a strongly politically correct edge, and it makes Christianity one of its primary targets. The head villain is a failed, corrupt Christian politician-businessman leading his own followers to a new planet — a portrait built specifically to indict religious and capitalist power at once. The film does contain redemptive threads: a sacrificial death, a hero who repeatedly gives himself up for others, and a plea for compassion and truth toward an intelligent alien species. But even these gestures live inside the film's humanist frame, not a biblical one — the story's version of martyrdom pairs self-sacrifice with the villain's death in the same act, which is closer to a very different tradition of "martyrdom" than to the self-giving love Christ modeled.

The politician-villain is written and played as a deliberate echo of a real, still-living political figure, right down to his speech patterns. That choice trades persuasive argument for caricature, and it's worth naming as a conviction about the filmmaking, not a verdict on any person.

Underneath the satire is a real longing — for a leader worth following, and for sacrifice that actually means something. Scripture answers both: "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13) — a love this film gestures toward but never quite reaches.

Bong Joon Ho had a genuinely fun sci-fi premise here, and you can see it in flashes. But the finished film spends its runtime mocking Christian faith through a clownish villain, wrapping that message in abundant profanity, strong violence, and sexual content. Our answer stands: skip it. For a family movie night that won't leave you defending the film to your kids, start with our latest.