What Mickey-17 Tells Us About What It Means for You To be "You".

Released in March 2025, Mickey-17 was met with mixed reception, with an aggregate Rotten Tomatoes score of 77%. Director Bong Joon-Ho had wide shoes to fill after the superhit of his previous movie, Parasite, which won an Oscar in 2020, which Mickey-17 has not quite matched. This time, with a Hollywood movie starring Robert Pattinson, Bong ventured into space, using the now tropaic premise of humans colonizing other planets after destroying Earth. Mickey-17’s unique twist on the typical post-Earth space exploration comes from its unique protagonist, Mickey, who is an “expendable” on the space journey, an individual who has to physically die over and over again, with his memories uploaded into a body processed from the ship’s waste.

The social message is clear and overt - a human being treated as a sponge, submitted to horrific deaths over and over again for the profit of a colonial experiment, his body literally made from refuse smacks of class consciousness, with Mickey a worker with little control over his own life. The movie makes many classical ethical references with Mickey’s role - the use of one person to protect an entire crew from disease invokes a variation on the trolley problem, questioning whether sacrificing one man to protect the lives of others, treating them as disposable and a sub-citizen is justified for the good of many…especially if the man signed a contract consenting to his use in such a way, and if his self is repeatedly preserved in the first place. This question is one of many societal ethical challenges Bong Joon-Ho tackles in the film—exploring colonialism, propaganda, securitization, wealth inequality, and more, the film overtly covers significant philosophical ground in about two hours.

Yet perhaps the most compelling philosophical aspect of Mickey-17 is its premise - the movie itself is an adaptation of the novel Mickey-7 by Edward Ashton, released in 2022. The book, in turn, was a fictionalized take of the teletransportation paradox, one of the biggest questions in contemporary philosophy of mind. Formulated by philosopher Derek Parfit in 1984, the paradox is simple—if a person is completely re-created in matter, is that person still the same? What if two people are created with identical DNA, identical memories, in the same continuity? How can they logically be the same person?

This paradox is explored in Mickey-17’s “multiples” - as two versions of Mickey, by pure accident, come to exist at the exact same time. Created by the same body printer, with the exact same memories uploaded from a brick, Mickey-17 and Mickey-18 are virtually indistinguishable from each other. This is not even a cloning premise, nor a multi-body premise like we see in James Cameron’s Avatar (2008). Mickey-17 and Mickey-18 are living simultaneous existences - at some point, there were two Mickeys with the same DNA, the same appearance, and the same psychological continuity. Which one of them is the true Mickey? Are neither of them Mickey?

The paradox challenges our traditional conceptions of the self - whether there is a single, continuous entity that is the same over the course of time and distinguishable from all others, the “I”. We see this paradox play out in the movie, as Mickey-17 and Mickey-18 have to confront their shared identity in real time. Both Mickeys tell themselves that they are the “real Mickey”—upon meeting each other, their first course of action is to immediately engage in a fight to the death. The film explores an ordinary man’s first confrontation of what it means to not be the only “him”. Yet, when Mickey-18 ultimately perishes in the climax of the film, it is treated as if a separate person has died, and Mickey-18 was a separate person after all. The audience is left with no clear take on the paradox - if not our memories, or our physical bodies, then what it is that determines who we are? Is there anything that truly does determine what makes us us?

While leaving this question unanswered, Mickey 17 does explore the important societal implications of this question of self. On Earth, these “multiples”, as these identical copies of individuals are known, are seen as ‘abominations’ after a challenging case where the pioneering scientist that created them turns out to be a psychopath murdering homeless people on the streets. Yet, the specificities of this case are left crucially unexplored—which multiple would be sentenced for which death? What if the multiples escaped from the “prime” or original self? Would they still be held culpable for the crime? The very exploration of the possibility that there are no reliable ways to determine whether “I” is “I” or “you” is “you” thus have major societal consequences - would DNA evidence be admissible in court? Could individuals with amnesia be prosecuted for crimes? Would a multiple be bound in matrimony to the spouse of the self they were copied from?

With the advancement of cloning technology and computational neural networks, a technology like the printers of Mickey-17 are no longer fodder for dissociated science-fiction, but serious questions to contend with. In a world where technology radically changes the way we see, think, and interact with the world, Mickey-17 is one in a long stream of reminders for us to think before we do, rather than reacting to what gets made.