Berlinale 2025 review: 'Mickey 17' - Robert Pattinson lives, dies, and repeats

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The wait's not made any easier by the numerous delays for his return to the sci-fi genre. But now it's finally here and for his third English-language feature, he's decided to adapt the novel "Mickey7" by Edward Ashton. It may not be his best, but it's certainly the funniest film he's done so far.

Set in 2054, we meet Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) as he's about to kick the bucket. No drama, mind you. This is just a regular occurrence.

Let's go back a bit. We find out that this poor bloke owed some serious cash to a pretty intimidating loan shark back on Earth. Mickey and his business partner Timo (Steven Yeun) had a crack at setting up a macaron business, thinking they'd be bigger than burgers. Unfortunately, the French delicacies didn't quite cut it.

It did lead to some ripper merchandise though, with ‘Macarons are not a sin’ t-shirts, so that’s something.

To get away from the chopper-attacking henchmen, the sweet treat business owners join an out-of-this-world adventure orchestrated by former politician turned wealthy influencer Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa, who's absolutely passionate about food (Toni Collette).

Mickey recklessly agrees to be an "expendable" without reading the fine print. The big print might give him a good deal, but the small print takes it all away. He signs his life away to be a test subject sent on repeated suicidal missions. When he gets knocked off – from radiation poisoning, a virus, or whatever – his body is chucked into a furnace and a new version of Mickey is 3D printed with all his memories reloaded. Live. Die. Repeat.

The snag is that the 17th iteration of Mickey is left for dead in a deep chasm on one outing by Timo (“Good on ya, mate, have a good sendoff, see ya tomorrow!”), leading to the creation of his 18th duplicate. This makes him a “multiple” – which is a breach of protocol and must be brought to an end with permanent deletion.

His girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) thinks a threesome is on the cards; Mickey 17 tries to come up with a way for both versions to get along; Mickey 18, a more ruthless clone, is after some payback.

Snag number 2 comes when the space colony comes across Creepers, the insect-alien mob described by Ylfa as "croissants dipped in crap" and which block Marshall's "spotless white planet."

He's not that interested in what a soul is and what it means to be alive. The moral, philosophical and even spiritual implications are touched on, but director Bong just wants to have a bit of a laugh. And so do the cast.

Pattinson is great here, bringing a bit of a goofy sensitivity to a role that Jim Carrey would've milked for laughs in the '90s. His serious and humble attitude in the face of death is one of the movie's best and most heartbreaking jokes, as is the insensitive question he keeps brushing off: "What's it like to die?" He nails playing both the soft and silly Mickey 17 (with a high-pitched voice matching his often heartbreaking resignation in the face of death) and the way more antagonistic Mickey 18, channelling Buster Keaton all the way through.

Elsewhere, Ruffalo's had a ripper of a time playing the self-absorbed villain with a mob of devoted fans, depicting Marshall as a bit of a caricature of the space-obsessed Elon Musk and the ratings-driven Donald Trump. His portrayal is matched by his co-star Collette, who's also having a crack as the brain behind the operation's wife who reckons "sauce is the litmus test of civilisation."

You can't help but notice the obvious connections to today's issues and direct nods to real-life figures, particularly when it comes to authoritarianism, xenophobia and the stress of living in a society dominated by late-stage capitalism.

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Sounds good, fair dinkum? It is... but it's also undeniably a bit of a mess and like Ruffalo's Trump send-up, the whole act starts to lose its momentum as the movie goes on.

But if you're in for a mind-bending space weirdness, you'll go completely off the rails!

Premieres at the 75th Berlinale in the Berlinale Special Gala section. It is released in cinemas in March.