Latest news with #Expendable
Mint
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
Bong Joon-ho's sci-fi comedy Mickey 17, starring Robert Pattinson, to stream globally on Max from THIS date
Mickey 17, the sci-fi black comedy film from Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho, is set to make its global streaming debut on Max on Friday, May 23. The film marked the return of Bong Joon-ho to the world of filmmaking after his Oscar-winning film, Parasite. Warner Bros. confirmed that Mickey 17, apart from being released on Max on May 23, will also premiere on HBO's linear channel the following day, Saturday, May 24, at 7:40 p.m. ET. Starring Robert Pattinson, the film is based on Edward Ashton's 2022 novel Mickey7 and presents a dystopian twist on the concept of workplace loyalty. Pattinson plays Mickey Barnes, an 'Expendable' — a disposable employee who is cloned each time he dies while carrying out dangerous missions for a human colony on a distant planet in the year 2054. The story blends biting humour with existential themes, exploring the human cost of survival and the absurdity of expendability. Mickey 17 premiered to strong reviews at Leicester Square in London on February 13, 2025, before screening at the 75th Berlin Film Festival. It was released theatrically in South Korea on February 28 and in the United States on March 7. The film has since grossed $131 million globally and received praise for its inventive storytelling, visual style, and Pattinson's performance. The cast also features Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo. Bong Joon Ho, best known for his landmark film Parasite, not only wrote and directed Mickey 17 but also co-produced it alongside Dooho Choi (Okja, Snowpiercer). Executive producers include Brad Pitt, Jesse Ehrman, Peter Dodd, and Marianne Jenkins. Combining cerebral science fiction with pitch-black humour, Mickey 17 continues Bong's tradition of blending genre storytelling with sharp social commentary — and now audiences worldwide can stream it from the comfort of their homes.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Steelers Officially Sign Pickens and DK Helper
For months, the Pittsburgh Steelers had been linked to a receiver, particularly early in the 2025 NFL Draft. The need to find receiver help alongside George Pickens was overwhelming. Eventually, it was addressed when Pittsburgh made its biggest splash of the offseason. The Steelers traded a second-round pick for the right to extend star receiver DK Metcalf, diminishing the need to draft a weapon and giving Pickens a partner with even more gravity than himself. Advertisement Pittsburgh didn't end up drafting a receiver, opting for quarterback Will Howard and running back Kaleb Johnson with its only offensive selections. That left the bottom of the receiving corps unaddressed, a hole that was quickly filled on Monday. Now we the Steelers signed a potential Metcalf complement in receiver Robert Woods. The deal is worth $2 million over one season as Woods looks to extend his respected NFL career. … and the deal went official on Thursday. Woods spent the 2024 season with the Houston Texans and posted his worst statistical season, logging just 20 catches for 203 yards. He did not find the end zone. It was the first season in which Woods didn't score in his 12-year NFL career, and he posted 223 fewer yards than his next-least-productive season (2023) – despite receivers dropping like flies around him. Advertisement That's a bit of a concern, but Woods won't be asked to generate a hefty target share or score a half-dozen touchdowns. He isn't likely to steal much of Calvin Austin's playing time in the slot, either. Woods can step in as the Z or slot receiver and offers an immediate path to playing time via his run blocking, which hasn't waned with his production. In an Arthur Smith-led offense, that lends itself to playing time, particularly on early downs. Woods is also a particularly quarterback-friendly target. He finds soft spots against zone well, has trustworthy hands, and his veteran acumen makes him a quick study. His experience doing the dirty work earned him a reputation with the Los Angeles Rams, where he was a key cog in their offensive machine. He'll have a much lesser role in Pittsburgh, but as a side character in an improving offense, Woods can find meaningful playing time in 2025. Related: Source Says Pickens Upset By Steelers 'Expendable' Trade Report Leak
Express Tribune
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Dying for a living
Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) wakes up as a "meat popsicle". Frozen stiff, vacuum-sealed, and utterly disposable, he's not even the first version of himself to see this bleak fate. This opening image of Mickey 17 sets the tone for Bong Joon-ho's latest: part grim existential crisis, part sadistic comedy, all wrapped in sleek sci-fi packaging. Corporate exploitation, class struggle, and the insanity of unfettered capitalism: the film takes Bong's favourite themes and runs them through a cloning machine, just to see how many times it can kill its protagonist before he finally snaps. And oh, does Mickey die. He dies a lot. To add to the already twisted reality of the film, the narrative isn't unfolding in real time. Most of what we see is already past tense, narrated by Mickey himself in a dry, reflective voiceover. It's a clever way to keep us locked in his head, which is a battlefield in which the pursuit of identity is a bigger problem than plain, old survival. If you get replaced every time you die, are you still you? Or just a slightly worse photocopy of the original? Bong Joon-ho's lab frog Early on, Mickey refers to himself as a "lab frog," a nod to the countless creatures sacrificed in the name of human progress. If you've seen Okja, you know Bong isn't subtle about corporate cruelty, and Mickey 17 takes that to new heights. Here, the "lab frogs" are people; to be specific, they are "Expendables" like Mickey, whose entire job is to die so others don't have to. Poisonous gas? Send Mickey. Unstable terrain? Send Mickey. Experimental vaccine? You get the idea. "Get used to dying," he's told. Mickey, ever the unlucky optimist, tries. Carrying their earthly nastiness to a whole other planet, the colony's bureaucrats treat Expendables like cheap, reusable batteries; inanimate things with no unions, no benefits, no real protection. Mickey, weighed down by threats from gangsters on earth, signs up for this horrific, experimental program without reading the fine print. In one of the film's sharpest exchanges, Mickey is asked to "prove he has faith in the system" right before being accepted as an Expendable. The system, of course, only works for those who never have to die for it. Meanwhile, the colony's leadership, led by coloniser Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) in full smarmy-overlord mode, preaches efficiency and sacrifice while living comfortably at the top. His wife, played by Toni Collette, is even more ruthless, manipulating everyone around her while barely lifting a finger. In typical Bong style, their vision for the new-world colony is eerily similar to a coloniser's imagination of a land and its people here on earth: a "planet of purity" where everything is neatly controlled, including the people. Sex, control, and revolution Speaking of control, one of the colony's strangest (and most telling) rules is the ban on sex. Framed as an energy-saving measure, the tactic runs much deeper than just conserving calories. When you sever intimacy, you sever rebellion because connection, in any form, is dangerous. It breeds loyalty outside the system, makes people care about each other, and caring is the first step toward resistance. Naturally, Mickey and his girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie, fierce and funny) don't care much for the rules. Their relationship is built upon the matters of the heart instead of the body, grounding Mickey in a way his countless resurrections can't. But when another worker, Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei), starts showing interest in him too, things get complicated. Even more so when Mickey well, multiplies. The real chaos kicks in when Mickey 17 is presumed dead, only for Mickey 18 to be printed in his place. Suddenly, there are two of him; one slightly more reckless, one slightly more paranoid. Pattinson, who has spent the last decade gleefully shedding his Twilight past with weirder, riskier roles, plays both Mickeys with a perfect mix of existential dread and smarmy charm. Mickey 17 is a people-pleaser, eager to keep the peace. Mickey 18? Not so much. Their interactions are both hilarious and eerie, as if the film itself is asking the age-old philosophical question: If all of a ship's paraphernalia is changed along its voyage, then, by the end of its journey, is it the same ship? Is it the same Mickey? Flawed but brutal Visually, Mickey 17 is stunning in a cold, calculated way. The icy planet of Niflheim is more mood than setting where everything is stark, industrial, and unforgiving. Fiona Crombie's production design makes the colony feel like a steel trap, while Darius Khondji's cinematography uses the 16:9 frame masterfully, pulling us in close for moments of tension and zooming out for jaw-dropping wide shots of the frozen wasteland. The blood and gore, when it comes, is artful and minimal because as always Bong does not have to rely on shock to build intrigue so he never wastes a drop. Even the insanely otherworldly "creepers" seem like they could climb out from under our beds if the weather was cold enough, that's how unflinchingly real Bong's suspension of disbelief is. No unnecessary violence fills the screen space, not even from abominable creatures from icy planets. In a film like this, the humour can only be dark and sadistic. Anyone who thinks otherwise requires serious help. Mickey's deaths are played for laughs as often as they are for horror. A brutal accident, followed by an unceremonious body dump. A gruesome malfunction, shrugged off by his superiors. Each death becomes an absurd corporate expense, just another number in the budget. Mickey 17 isn't as tightly constructed as Parasite or Snowpiercer. It's messier, more chaotic, sometimes losing focus under the weight of its own ideas. But it's also ambitious, weird, and thoroughly entertaining. Pattinson carries it with ease, and Bong's signature mix of sharp satire and high-concept sci-fi mostly works, even when it stumbles. Perhaps the film's greatest contention is its ending. Without spoiling anything, let's just say it leans hard into ambiguity. Some will call it brilliant. Others will leave the theatre muttering, "Wait, what?" Either way, Bong has done it again: taken a wild, high-concept premise and turned it into a biting critique of power, identity, and the disposable nature of labour. It's not his best work. But like Mickey himself, it gets back up, dusts itself off, and keeps you watching. Would I recommend it? Sure. Just don't get too attached to the first version of it you see.
Washington Post
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘Mickey 17' sends in the clones in a devilish Bong Joon Ho satire
'Mickey 17' is the latest firecracker placed between our toes by the South Korean director/prankster/genius Bong Joon Ho. It's his first film since 'Parasite' became the first foreign language movie to win a best picture Oscar in 2020, and while it's not his best work, 'Mickey 17' is still a great deal of acrid fun. In the bargain, you get three great performances from two very good actors. As the film opens, we're a few decades into the future and a space colonization mission under the leadership of messianic ex-Congressman Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) is trying to set up shop on the ice planet of Niflheim. Among the many busy worker bees under his leadership is Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), a sweet but hapless schmendrick who has made the mistake of signing up as the colony's 'Expendable.' A new technology allows human beings to be 'reprinted' when they die, body and memories intact, and while Expendables are too controversial to be permitted on Earth, they make a fine test case for interstellar exploration. Need someone to fix a spaceship exterior while getting blasted by deadly radiation? Use an Expendable — you can always print a new one. (And it really is a printer, ka-chunging out a new body like an old Epson dot-matrix and dumping the results on the floor if you forget the tray.) So poor Mickey signs up to be the canary in the colony's coal mine. Between the radiation, serving as a guinea pig for an antiviral vaccine and other mishaps, he's already gone through Mickeys 1 through 16 when the movie begins and is up to Mickey Version 17. It's not a bad life, or lives. He has a devoted girlfriend in security officer Nasha (Naomi Ackie of 'Blink Twice'), a slippery best buddy in Timo (the always-welcome Steven Yeun) and the condescending admiration of the other colonists, who see Mickey as their personal village idiot but who also really want to know what dying feels like. Wouldn't you want to know, too? As is his wont, Bong slips the obvious ethical/existential issues under the skin of a diabolical sci-fi action comedy. Based on a 2022 novel by Edward Ashton, 'Mickey 17' finds the director back in his wheelhouse of day-after-tomorrow satire following the contemporary head games of 'Parasite.' The new film is very much in line with 2006's 'The Host' (Bong's idea of a Godzilla movie), 2013's 'Snowpiercer' (humanity stuck on a trans-global bullet train, rich folk in the front and the poor in steerage) and 2017's 'Okja' (about a girl and her two-ton, genetically modified super-pig). Dig deep enough and you'll find a molten core of class rage, nurtured in South Korea's stratified society and easily exported for use in English-language blockbusters. But Bong is also a born filmmaker, and he dramatizes the deadly serious war between the haves and have-nots with slapstick invention that translates to irresistible entertainment. Here, his chosen instrument of subversion is Pattinson, an actor whom the masses may still dismiss as that pretty-boy vampire from the 'Twilight' movies but who the attentive know is a gifted and playfully eccentric taker of risks. For Mickey 17, Pattinson adopts the affectless voice and shambling posture of a likable loser — it's an enjoyable performance, but you think that's all there is to it until Mickey 18 shows up. Wait, who's Mickey 18? Through complications I won't spoil, two Mickeys suddenly exist at the same time, and while the philosophical implications of non-selfhood get a brief chewing over, 'Mickey 17' is more intrigued by the differences between the two. If Mickey 17 is a bit of a milquetoast, Mickey 18 is a bit of a psycho — a swaggering alpha male who kicks the movie's plot into high gear. Among other things, Bong makes sure we see Nasha's eyes light up at the prospect of having two Mickeys in her bed — the nice guy and the bad boy. (She calls them 'Mild' and 'Habanero,' but whatever.) It's in the contrast between the two characters that a viewer takes the measure of Pattinson's talent, his knack for physical comedy and the subtlety with which he embodies each Mickey's best and worst traits. He — they — it — are a marvel. Meanwhile, over in the other corner, Ruffalo is giving a master class in outsize political satire, playing the colony's cult head by rolling up every jingoistic bully you can imagine into one overinflated buffoon. There's Elon's blithering, blinkered self-regard in there, and Mussolini's posture, Dear Orange Leader's speech patterns and RFK Jr.'s teeth. It ain't subtle, but it's a hoot. (Toni Collette doesn't get a lot to do as the character's wife, the brains behind the throne, but there's always too much going on in a Bong movie — that's the fun of them and sometimes the liability.) I haven't mentioned the scuttling creatures that run rampant on Niflheim, dubbed 'creepers' and looking like a cross between a buffalo and a microscopic water bear. They're possibly more sentient than the colonists would like to admit — 'Don't call them aliens,' Mickey 17 cautions someone. 'We're the aliens.' — and the final scenes of 'Mickey 17' envision a snowy showdown between Them and Us that brings the movie to a clattery and generally satisfying finale. A Bong Joon Ho film tends to spin faster and faster as it goes, wild with invention, high spirits and a fury toward the people in charge that we're invited to apply to our own lives once the lights come up. To them, we're all replaceable, re-printable and expendable. In 'Mickey 17,' the toner's running low and we've just about had enough. R. At area theaters. Contains violent content, language throughout, sexual content and drug material. 137 minutes. Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr's Watch List at
Chicago Tribune
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘Mickey 17,' with Robert Pattinson (and clone) tackling the worst job in the universe
Set 29 years from now, writer-director Bong Joon Ho's 'Mickey 17' imagines a world beyond ours because Earth isn't worth the trouble anymore. Failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), taking a page from the Elon Musk interstellar-ambitions handbook, gains a new lease on his career by leading a cultlike space colonization mission to the icy planet Niflheim. And there they are: Niflheim mysterious, oversized, toothy bugs, the native life forms of indeterminate hostility, nicknamed 'creepers' by the visiting humans. The human at the center of 'Mickey 17' is Mickey Barnes, a genial sad-sack who has volunteered for the mission because loan sharks are trying to kill him on Earth, along with his dubious friend Berto (Steven Yeun). As an Expendable, Mickey takes the single lowest rung on the job ladder. He's a human guinea pig on a 'Groundhog Day' sort of work schedule: In the interest of science, Expendables are exposed to various lethal threats, poison gas or radiation, etc. Mickey dies many times, and then is reborn. A new body, just like Mickey's old one, comes out of a reprinting machine, with all his memories and features intact. The technology making this possible, along with some unauthorized cloning, has caused some fuss on Earth, but off-Earth? No problem. No federal oversight to worry about. The equipment on the spaceship may be a little wonky — in one of the film's better running gags, the human reprinter machine clearly needs some oiling, and makes noises like a 2003-era Hewlett Packard paper printer — but for Mickey, it's a living. Dying, but a living. Where 'Mickey 17' takes these ideas takes us, in turn, through a crazily uneven movie only a first-rate filmmaker could've made. It's full of lovely little visual touches and some occasionally funny jabs at the excesses of capitalism and the limits of AI and cloning technology. It's also a bit of a chore. Bong, the South Korean visionary whose previous film was the class-warfare masterwork 'Parasite' (2019), struggles to compact the source material. The movie comes from Edward Ashton's 2022 novel 'Mickey 7,' which traveled to different worlds, and had more time to interweave the conflicts arising from two Mickeys competing for dominance. Pattinson manages a fine and witty character delineation between good-hearted, passive #17 and steely, brutal #18. This ticklish situation at first entices Mickey's lover, the ace security agent Nasha (Naomi Ackie, reliably terrific and a true movie star), who sees her sexual options as having improved 100%. But 'Mickey 17' darts away from this 'Design for Living' ménage à trois prospect, because there are more conventional story chunks to address. The limitations and frustrations of 'Mickey 17' are partly to do with narrative and partly tone. Bong retains a daring and, I think, misjudged amount of authorial voiceover, delivered by Pattinson sounding a little like Steve Buscemi. While the film's visual design is sharp throughout, blanketed by cinematographer Darius Khondji's peerless eye for warmth amid chilly thematic circumstances, the satire's a mite ham-handed. Actors as skillful as Ruffalo and Toni Collette, the craven leader Marshall's imperious wife, come off pretty pushy here. You just never know about tone, and how any project mixing sci-fi with political allegory and a fair amount of bleccchy viscera will turn out. Not that many movies try that mixture, but Bong has made at least three, including the superior 'Snowpiercer' (2013) and the animal rights and giant pig fantasy 'Okja' (2017). These two relate strongly to the themes in 'Mickey 17.' I was with Bong's latest about half the time. The other half? Even a first-rate director can get a little lost in the tone management and narrative streamlining process. 'Mickey 17' — 2.5 stars (out of 4)
