Mickey 17 Predicts Our Dystopian Future Under Capitalism
- theghoulsnextdoor
- Jun 19
- 16 min read
Mickey 17 is an entertaining science fiction film that distills the fearful future of unchecked capitalism into a heartfelt, comedic romp. The Ghouls discuss what Mickey 17 gets right about Elon Musk’s Mars plan, our likely dystopian future after a second Trump Presidency, the reality of human cloning, and the horrors of climate change. How close are we to Bong Joon-ho’s dystopian space odyssey?
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Mickey 17 (2025):
During a human expedition to colonize space, Mickey 17, a so-called "expendable" employee, is sent to explore an ice planet.
Director: Bong Joon Ho
Mickey 17’s Not Too Distant Future & How We Can Stop It
by gabe castro
RED: Quotes, someone else's words.
Synopsis
Mickey 17 is an entertaining science fiction film that distills the fearful future of unchecked capitalism into a heartfelt, comedic romp. Based on the book, Mickey7, written by Edward Ashton, the film follows Mickey, a lower-class, regular degular sweetheart who, after some poor choices and even poorer-placed trust, finds himself aboard a spaceship on its way to a new planet. While the journey itself is both bleak and tempered hope, Mickey’s specific experience is unique and heartbreaking. In a desperate effort to secure his seat on the ship to escape violent debt collectors, Mickey has signed up as an “Expendable,” a human who is cloned and then used as a guinea pig for any scientific curiosity the ship needs to explore.
The ship is “helmed” by a fanatic politician, Kenneth Marshall, and his wife, Ylfa. Marshall is followed by religious extremists who put him on a pedestal, worshipping him like a new-age God. The comparison to Trump and the radical MAGAts is hard to ignore (though actor Mark Ruffalo insists it was not his intention.) He rules the ship with a loose iron fist, hosting special dinners with selective members and attempting to inspire the “right people” to assist with repopulating the new planet. He is also eager to expend Mickey wherever necessary, as he had suggested the use of an expendable in space to begin with, and fights to retain power in his greasy, clumsy, fat fists.
Because Mickey is an Expendable, we first meet him during the presumed death of his 17th self. Through flashbacks, we learn of the fate of his previous 16 Mickeys - falling victim to a range of torturous ends for the science team’s data. One Mickey is left outside the spaceship, slowly dying of radiation poisoning and instructed to notify the staff of every grueling piece of his death (how long before he begins bleeding from every orifice, before he’s blind, and ultimately until he dies.) The sweet and gentle Mickey’s only solace is in the arms of his love, the powerful and intelligent Nasha. They steal away for forbidden acts of intimacy and share an intense and endearing love. Nasha cares greatly for Mickey, keeping him from bullies and interested parties as well as suiting up to hold him during the more gruesome chemical death trials.
When they finally arrive on the new planet, Mickey is subjected to a wide range of trials and deaths to find a vaccine for the diseases found on the planet. Once acquired, Mickey and a small team explore the new world. They discover the only other lifeforms on the planet - these fuzzy, isopod-like beings that inadvertently cause the death of one of the members, a non-expendable. As punishment for not dying instead of a non-expendable, Mickey is tasked with wandering the new world where he eventually finds himself fallen into an ice cavern where he is presumed dead, eaten by the creatures (creepers). Only, they didn’t eat him at all and instead saved him! This leads to a new Mickey being printed, while the previous Mickey (17) still lives, leading to a cursed case of Multiples.
Mickey 18 is quite different from our sweet Mickey 17; he has a mean streak and condemns 17 for his meekness and history of passivity. Nasha had told 17 that his iterations tended to be a bit different, leaning into different emotions more heavily than others - I wonder if this was a connection to each death, a reaction to his emotions on the way out? 17 and 18 battle to exist, as they also fight to protect the Creepers from the greasy, pathetic hands of Marshall and his sauce-obsessed wife.
The movie is 2 hours and 17 minutes of very overt commentary on our capitalistic, exploitative, and fanatical present that will undoubtedly lead to some tortured and bleak future, even if not this dramatic version, certainly something equally dim.
Trump’s Dim Future
Though the film is quite lighthearted and charmingly bizarre, there’s no room for misunderstanding the heavy-handed commentary by Bong (something his films are well known for). When Mickey, in a desperate attempt to leave this planet to escape the terror of debt collectors, signs the paperwork to become an expendable, a treacherous sandstorm brews outside the glass building. People are frantic to abandon a planet intent on killing them, natural disasters are on the rise, as well as crime and desperation. There are many parallels to the fears expressed in this film to our own when exploring the damage down during Trump’s first term (when this film was written - production was in 2022) to now, an apocalyptic second term that’s somehow even more reckless and unpoliced, undoubtedly spelling a dark, grim future for our planet and humanity.
With our own natural disasters rising in frequency and severity, our climate crisis is no secret. Temperatures are rising, breaking records for the hottest days while melting our ice caps. We are at a point where the crisis is no longer a matter of stopping the effects but instead, aiming to dampen the intensity of climate change. Our planet is at great risk, and by electing (or rigging) Trump into another term, and in turn providing Project 2025 power, we’ve moved even further into our own doom. Project 2025 and Trump’s Administration spell horror for much of our country’s checks, balances, and overall democracy, but it also threatens the entirety of the world. We’ve already seen the impact of Trump’s ill-advised and foolish tariffs on foreign governments as well as our own. But Project 2025 also leans heavily toward preserving the status quo and empowering oil and gas billionaires. Its goal is to keep the power in their hands, and during a time in which we desperately need to be making evasive and reparative action to alleviate the damage done to our planet, there’s little hope we’ll be able to stop the crisis.
So it is of no surprise that while Marshall’s policies and plans most likely contributed to the crisis on their planet Earth, he is also first in line to leave the planet. And while it would bring me much pleasure to say goodbye to Musk and his lackeys as they board a doomed flight to Mars for colonization (Titan Submersible part 2, anyone?), such an event wouldn’t occur until after our planet reached the point of no return (check out our Don’t Look Up episode for more on this.)
We’ve already barely survived one Trump presidency, of which we are still very much feeling the effects of, and will still for many decades to come. After his first term, we saw the elimination of environmental regulations, horrifying immigration policies, closer ties with Israel, and a reshaping of the federal judiciary. His second term threatens a new brand of horrors now that much of our checks and balances have been dismantled or blatantly ignored. While the film is very much a science fiction comedy, it leans towards speculative fiction when viewed in a world plagued by rampant AI, an administrative rhetoric inspiring a blatant disregard for humans, and severe cuts to our environmental protection, healthcare, and human rights programs.
The Ethics of Scientific Studies
With the lovable and kind Mickey acting as a live-action crash test dummy, we’re forced to feel intensely uncomfortable with his treatment. In the beginning, when the cavalier and shitty friend, Timo asks, “What’s it feel like to die?,” we set the tone for a dystopian future in which one person’s humanity is worth less than the others. It’s a wild and comical science fiction world of fantastical science like cloning, but the emotions and motivations of the characters are very real.
Humanity’s history of experimenting on the lower class and vulnerable persons to advance scientific discoveries is far from news. Throughout periods of time in which horrific human rights violations were happening in broad daylight (slavery, Jim Crow, the holocaust), there were even more terrors occurring in the dark in the name of science. America’s history is saturated with abuses to the Black bodies that helped build it, from the Tuskegee syphilis study to the current-day forced sterilization of Black women in prison. Horrors so deep that many Black Americans today still don’t trust in the medical system or in science, who could blame them for their caution?
The use of Mickey’s “expendable” body, a body that even before he filled out that paperwork was very much expendable, is not a far leap from reality. We can look to the history of vaccines, a favorite discussion amongst students of ethics, in weighing one life versus the so-called “greater good,” as an example of how easy it is for humanity to look the other way. Edward Jenner discovered the smallpox vaccine by injecting the son of his gardener with cowpox and then smallpox to test his hypothesis that one would cancel out the other - ie, a vaccine. While this rather shady study resulted in the discovery of vaccines and later, the eradication of smallpox, it has led to many conversations on the ethics of this medical study. How much agency did the young boy have in this experiment, and had Jenner been wrong in thinking cowpox could immunize someone from smallpox, he’d have simply killed this boy. I doubt the death of this one, lower-class boy would’ve halted the studies, as we’ve seen throughout history, these lives mean little when scientific discoveries could be had.
Imagine a future where we continue these experiments on the vulnerable populations of our planet, but we can also bring those very people back to experiment on them all over again? It’s like an infinite cheat for power and science - all at the expense of these “expendables.” The scientist on the ship injects Mickey with all manner of diseases and chemicals in pursuit of knowledge. The shortest lifetime of Mickey’s is but a few minutes as they wake him from the printer with a syringe of a mysterious liquid. We see montages of him in cordoned-off, sterile rooms, dying slow deaths - vomiting, skin full of blisters, and utterly alone (until the brilliant and kind Nasha joins him.) We later discover that one of the chemicals Mickey had been injected with wasn’t for the vaccine for the planet but instead a chemical weapon that they later plan to use on the Creepers. Not all sketchy and violating experiments on the human body lead to the exonerating answer of a vaccine; some experiments are far more horrific.
The Power of Empathy at the End of the World
It’s quite deliberate and important that the Mickey we come to love in the film is a truly kind and soft-hearted man. Even Mickey 18 has an intense care within him as he expresses the same frustrations viewers may feel towards him - stick up for yourself, man! As viewers, we want Mickey 17 to win. We want him to be free of the trials and to live out his life with Nasha. We cringe and are outraged as he hangs outside the ship dying of radiation exposure, we soften and hurt as we watch him shiver and vomit in the cold, sterile medical room, and we may even cry as Nasha fights her way to his side, holding him so he doesn’t have to suffer alone anymore.
It’s intentional to have the simple, kind Mickey as our hero. As well as having Nasha be such a loving, strong, and genuine human. A ride or die who doesn’t hesitate to help others in need, putting her own body at risk to help the man she loves or a small creature she doesn’t fully understand. Bong is asking us about our capacity for empathy - can we care for another human? Are other people expendable to us? Are creatures or other people who may not look like us worthy of care, respect, and kindness? In our Wicked episode, we talked about how easy it is for people to fall for the trap of othering a group of people, of scapegoating them, and later, allowing inhumane treatment because we have been led to think so little of them.
Our capacity for empathy is a great power that we all need to strengthen right now. In a world where people are being kidnapped from our country under the guise of “making America great again,” and where the lives of Palestinians dwindle every day during the onslaught of violence and genocide by Israel, our empathy can feel like a heavy cross to bear. But that empathy is the only thing that can save those very same lives, that can bring those people home, and can change the world for the better. Bong encourages us to be the Mickey and Nasha that we can be. To pedestal love and care above all else - because only then can we get through these dark and challenging times.
Mickey 17: Worker Exploitation in Space Capitalism
by Kat Kushin
RED: Quotes, someone else's words.
Worker Exploitation in Space Capitalism
Mickey 17 shows us a DEPRESSING but hauntingly realistic future in which the planet is dying, and a Trump-Elon hybrid of a man with his cult-like followers leads an expedition to space. This exhibition, run by a company and Trumpelon, aims to find a new planet for humanity to live on, since the Earth is no longer a viable option. This isn’t the first example the ghouls have covered of this theme, as we saw this in Alien (all of them) as well as The Expanse, and many others. Predictably capitalism sucks, even in the vast abyss of space. I don’t think it’s the future that Octavia Butler envisioned when they hoped for us to take flight towards the stars. Mickey, as an expendable, acts as an example of how quickly humanity can be socialized into dehumanizing a person. What is fun about Mickey 17 is that we already know that life is expendable to those in power; they treat us like Mickey every day, to varying degrees, but we get to see a dramaticized version of this problem through the use of cloning.
When the white man can’t exploit the earth any further, they will flee accountability for their crimes amongst the stars. Predictably, Elon Musk wants to be THAT white man so bad. As gabe mentions, Musk has his plan to colonize Mars via SpaceX, and between Starlink satellites falling out of the sky and Tesla cars breaking apart piece by piece on the road, there is very little optimism to be had for a Mickey 17 future. If you really want to feel dystopian terror, I recommend reading about the project for SpaceX as well as just space colonization and capitalism, because the rich have their eyes on space, and plan to exploit us here as much as they can to get there. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be researching space, or even travel through space more, I just think it shouldn’t be at the cost of what little planet we have left. The technology they would have to mine resources for would exacerbate already huge climate problems, as well as further damage the ozone layer.
We recommend reading Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood series to imagine a brighter future for Earth where we’ve abandoned our hierarchical traits and embraced new ways of living in harmony. We also recommend Michaela Loach’s It’s Not that Radical to envision and understand ways we can save our planet today to avoid a spooky future like the one proposed in this film.
Worker Isolation: The Reason for One Expendable
For me, the use of one expendable was intentional. Ignoring the possibility of multiples for a second, it felt purposeful to have Mickey as the only one continuing to be cloned. While we can look at cloning and downloadable consciousness as a pathway to “live forever” in a new flesh prison, something the rich would covet. At first, I was surprised that they would use technology that I imagine was very expensive to clone a human being with little power or status. Living forever has long been the goal of the hyper-wealthy. But after thinking about it further, it makes sense as a means of worker exploitation, and also as a representation of the hyper-wealthy using lower-class populations as experiments for their betterment. If anything, the most unrealistic piece of this picture was that Mickey was a white man, since historically that has not been the case.
At first, I also questioned the fact that more people weren’t signing up for this kind of position, aside from maybe that they had learned better from the world than to trust a company in this way. Maybe in that way, it was realistic that Mickey was white, because other folks knew better than to trust the government or a company. But the selection of Mickey and his solitude isolate Mickey so entirely that he could relate to no one else, and therefore would be easier to dehumanize and exploit. There is a lot of literature around the idea of isolation as a tool for oppression, and it felt very intentional to me that there was only one slot available for the expendable position (Our episode on Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor explores this idea of Worker Isolation as control quite well!). It made it so that no one else could relate to Mickey entirely, because they were not also expendable. It made it so he was either to dehumanize and devalue each of his 18 lives. It also felt intentional that his love interest was a Black woman, arguably the only other human that might know what Mickey is going through in this dystopian hellscape of late-stage space capitalism.
Worker exploitation extends past the isolation of a person from the means of production. Systems of oppression benefit from our separation within the workplace. That’s why places will tell you not to discuss salaries with your coworkers, or expect you not to have good relationships with those coworkers. The goal of this is to keep us from talking to each other because together we have power. (Check out our episode on Severance season 1 for more on Worker Power!) The difference is, this story is in literal space. The stakes in space are even higher than on land, because at least on land, your boss couldn’t stop feeding you the grey goop, or melt you in an incinerator when you do something they don’t like. They can take away your job, which takes away your livelihood. They can bust unions and funnel money into politicians' pockets to make working conditions worse. But they can’t kill you…Unless you try to talk about their wrongdoings in court. But…all that is to say is that by placing our population in space, you make them even more vulnerable. Mickey was the essential piece of the space exploitation puzzle, though, because even though everyone was being exploited in space within the film, by making someone who was exploited the worse, it created a degree of separation that made those not continuously being murdered feel that their lives mattered more and for some grandeur purpose. They had to be better than Mickey to validate the lack of food they were receiving, as well as the fact that they were instructed to count calories and also refrain from sex and connection.
This separation was intentional from an empathy standpoint, but also from a “it could be much worse” standpoint. The people on the ship are desensitized to Mickey’s death and treat him less than. Mimicking the direction of their leader. Commander Marshall and Ylfa, time and time again, show how little the people on the ship matter to them. In the dinner scene, “honoring” Mickey and a soldier, shows us even more how monstrous these characters are. Within minutes, Commander Marshall shows that he only views women as future breeders for the next generation of humans, and otherwise invaluable, much like our republican administration. Simultaneously, Ylfa shows that she views Mickey’s life with less value than a literal rug on the ground of the ship, much as how rich people will value the latest tech, clothing, or home goods above the human lives it takes to create them. In the most American way possible, there is someone whose lives they value even less than Mickey, and that is the native population of the planet they have literally invaded. Reduced to the pursuit of sauce, which felt like a nod to the fact that Europe colonized the world for spices, tea, and seasoning, entirely ignoring the suffering and loss of life that got them those spices.
Cloning and the future
Cloning is already beginning to be possible (check out our episode on Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy for more on cloning and other freaky science). We have cloned animals pretty successfully at this point, and Inside the Creepy, Surprisingly Routine Business of Animal Cloning | The Atlantic By Bianca Bosker, they unpack the cloning of carcasses for the purpose of making more meat, using the cells of high-quality animal carcasses to create new living ones. Through this process, they successfully cloned living cows. Cloning has been happening for a while to animals, specifically, the most famous example being Dolly the Sheep from Scotland in 1996. Dolly lived until 2003, but it was found that the cloned sheep aged prematurely and also experienced tumor growth at a higher rate. There has been a push for legislation to criminalize the cloning of human beings. Most countries have outlawed human cloning for obvious ethical concerns, but animal cloning is widely unrestricted. We could be eating and drinking products from cloned animals today, as it is approved by the FDA to do so.
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