(Very light spoiler alert) I tried to watch Mickey-17 a few nights ago. I'm generally a fan of weird, wacky movies with excellent execution and was hopeful that this one by Bong Joon Ho would fit the bill: guy signs on to a space colonization mission as the guinea pig clone -- he gets all the worst, most dangerous jobs and if he dies they just print a new version of him and upload his memories.

It's not the kind of movie where you are supposed to pay attention to technical details.

Story started out pretty slow: a lot of backstory! Mickey tried to make it big by starting a macaroon restaurant chain but it didn't do well and he funded the failure with a loan from shady guys who like chainsaws so he needs to escape.

And then there's this corrupt politician (like a very flat stereotype of what everybody thinks a rich, power-hungry politician is like) and before we get any further I will say that this character is the worst part of half of the movie I actually watched. He's too much like a clown. I get that it's supposed to be satire, but none of the other characters were anywhere near as flat. It doesn't really matter what the politician is doing (is he running away from some mess he made or pulling a long con on everyone or trying to market an unethical cloning technology or is it some kind of racial purity thing?), he was just unpleasant to watch.

So finally we are on the spaceship, heading to some random planet and we get the montage of Mickeys 1 - 16 dying in gruesome and horrible ways, being reprinted, dying again, being reprinted, developing an intimate relationship with a security officer, dying again, being reprinted, and so forth.

I thought things would get better once we made it to the alien planet. There is another lifeform on the planet (of course) and Mickey-17 learns something important about them. But instead of sticking with that storyline, we go to some kind of wacky love triangle or quadrangle and also there's something about drug-dealing...

And this is where my wife fell asleep and I decided to turn out the lights and stop the show so as not to bother her.

If it was me, I would have cut the corrupt politician guy and his wife completely -- didn't add much anyway -- focused entirely on the dynamics of Mickey being a clone and knowing he's gonna die again soon and how that changes him. If you really want to take it in a weird direction, Mickey should have been repeatedly cloned until he formed a servant underclass for the new planet and then it could have become a rebellion story like Spartacus where Mickey-17 rises to prominence and saves the day. "I am Mickey!" "I am Mickey!" "We are all Mickey" but like...actually MIckey. For all I know, maybe that's how the movie ends.

I don't think I'll find out.

The posters were fire though: