Seeing double
Bong Joon Ho's Mickey 17 looks like a delightful adaptation of Ed Aston's 2022 novel
A couple of years ago, I picked up Ed Ashton's novel Mickey 7 and blew through it in a couple of sittings. It was a fun thriller with a neat twist on the "transporter paradox": what happens when you come across your exact duplicate? Which one is the "true" version?
Not too long after the book came out in 2022, it was scooped up for adaptation (renamed Mickey 17) by South Korean director Bong Joon Ho, who was just coming off of a Best Picture win at the Oscars for his film Parasite, and who's known for some of his outlandish genre films like The Host, Snowpiercer, and Okja.
The film went into production later that year, with the plan of getting released into theaters in the winter/spring of 2024. That obviously didn't happen: Warner Bros. has been undergoing some turmoil and restructuring (not to mention the big writer's strike), and the film was bumped to next year: January 31st.
Warner Bros. finally released a full trailer for the film this week, and it looks like it'll be really interesting thing to watch: zany and somewhat serious.
I've really been impressed with Robert Patterson's work in the last couple of years: he was excellent in Christopher Nolan's Tenet and Matt Reeves's The Batman, and this feels like it'll be a fun role for him.
The novel follows a guy who's eager to get away from Earth, and jumps to the head of the line for a colonization project by volunteering to be the mission's expendable crew member. His consciousness is backed up on a computer and whenever there's a stupidly dangerous problem that needs to be solved, Mickey's the guy to do it. Throughout the book, he's killed in some pretty gruesome ways, from radiation poisoning or other injuries. It's not exactly a coveted job. After his body is recycled, he's decanted and his memories are uploaded into the new body.
That's all fine, until he's left for dead on the icy planet where they're trying to set down a colony, but ends up surviving. When he limps his way back to base, he finds that his replacement has been activated, and he-they aren't willing to be recycled. It's a fun, quick read, and it brings up some interesting questions about consciousness and being, and some of the problems inherent in a world where you can back people up in replacement bodies.
I'm looking forward to checking this out when it hits theaters in a couple of months, and I should probably read the novel's sequel, Antimatter Blues, which came out last year. Ashton also has another book (a standalone) coming out around the same time as the film, The Fourth Consort, which looks pretty neat as well.