The Original Mickey 17 Story Had a Murderous Clone Who Took Over an Entire Planet

Warning: Light spoilers follow for Mickey 17.

Adaptation is an art and few have made it as wryly fun as Parasite director Bong Joon Ho has with his new film Mickey 17. Though the film follows the broad narrative strokes of Edward Ashton’s similarly darkly playful sci-fi novel Mickey7, and has some of the same questions floating around about the nature of the self, the way Mickey 17 explores broader ideas about love, death, compassion, and violence couldn’t be more different.

Ashton’s story focuses on the perspective of Mickey (perfectly played in the film by a raucous Robert Pattinson at his most wonderfully weird), the titular “expendable” who gets killed and then cloned over and over on a dangerous space-colonizing mission. But that’s only a fraction of what gives the film version life. It’s through an increased focus on the supporting characters that Bong makes the film something he can definitively call his own. Like the central character who finds himself repeatedly replicated, this is no mere carbon copy, but something much more. Just as each of the Mickey copies had slight personality differences, eventually resulting in Mickey 18 being more aggressive, the film too puts its own twist on the novel’s narrative.

Different Planets, Different Deaths, and a Maniacal Expendable

In the book we get a sense of how Mickey was having a hard time back on his original planet of Midgard and needed to escape due to some debts, though this is changed in the film to be Earth. Where Ashton doesn’t give us much of a sense of what life was like on that planet, Bong makes this a focal point, showing how the people fleeing Earth are doing so in order to escape from what has become an increasingly inhospitable world. In both versions, Mickey and his shipmates are trying to set up some sort of beachhead colony on the icy planet of Niflheim. The scene in the movie where Mickey signs up to be an expendable is set against the backdrop of a devastating sandstorm that has become so normalized that people don’t seem to think much of it. In the book, Mickey has no relationship to Earth and Midgard doesn’t have any of the same ecological catastrophes driving people to look to the stars.

Yes, our planet does exist in the novel, but it’s referred to as “old Earth.” Meanwhile, Midgard is “almost a paradise” where people don't typically have money problems, as nearly everything is automated, from industry to agriculture. Just like other planets in the Union (which includes all the other established colonies), people seem to be doing well. The trouble is that Mickey is not skilled in any real way, which is something the film also establishes. What’s different in the novel is that he likes reading history and does so many times to learn more about what went wrong on a series of ill-fated colony missions. What gets him in trouble is that, while he can survive off a stipend he receives, he is searching for meaning and makes bad money decisions.

This is what brings us to the same element of him becoming an expendable. The first “death” we see (which actually ends up not killing him) is the same in both book and movie, and indeed, most of the ways that Mickey dies in the movie are similar. The primary difference is that there are more of them in the film, and Bong establishes that the repetitive nature of them is what becomes most crushing to the character. The main differences in the book in this regard are some of his early deaths. There is one extended portion devoted to a catastrophe on the ship that Mickey must fix by exposing himself to extreme amounts of radiation. There is a similar scene where he is also exposed to radiation in the film, but this is played more for grim laughs as we see him stranded outside before his hand is severed. The book, on the other hand, traps him inside and sees him even killing himself rather than die a slow painful death that he’ll be forced to remember when he gets reprinted.

The lore surrounding expendables and why doubles (the idea of multiple copies of the same person that becomes a key turning point in both stories) are an almost existential concern for many is deepened in the novel. In Chapter 17, the history buff version of Mickey takes us through the story of Alan Manikova. Though there is a version of this character in the film who becomes a serial killer and created multiple versions of his psychopathic self, the novel explores how he takes over another planet (known as Gault) where he builds an army of multiples. He then blew up a ship sent to see what his intentions were and another planet in the Union, Farhome, decided to launch an unmanned ship at him that would not slow down. Armed with explosives, it obliterated his planet at the speed of light (a la the striking scene from Star Wars: The Last Jedi). So while both the movie and book establish why it is that expendables are feared, the latter makes it clear that it’s because of a greater threat that a double once posed.

From Militaristic Leader to Outlandish Villain

Though both film and novel drop us into their worlds in similar ways, with the unlucky Mickey finding himself left for dead underground on said coldly desolate planet only to return back to the base above to find there is another version of him wandering about, Mickey 17 becomes radically different once we get to know the people that populate it. Where Ashton’s story finds a villain of sorts in the militaristic leader Marshall, Bong’s sharp sci-fi takes the name of the character and little else. Played in the film by an intentionally outlandish Mark Ruffalo, making his character in 2023’s Poor Things look downright restrained by comparison, he is an egotistical, self-centered, and generally unseemly fascist who, alongside his wife Ylfa (a terrific Toni Collette), has rallied a group of fanatical followers who seem to worship at his feet even as he not only puts them all at risk, but also views them with disdain. He needs to feel important, even if he’s an utter idiot, acting solely in his own self-interest and caring not at all for the destruction he causes to others.

It’s here that we see Bong effectively opening up entirely new thematic territory for himself and the film. Where the novel mostly keeps Marshall in the background as someone for Mickey to steer clear of, both because the leader views him as an abomination on religious grounds and because Mickey doesn’t want Marshall to figure out that he’s now a double, Mickey 17 brings him to the forefront. Sure, there are some elements carried over from the novel, but the character here is so much more deliberately over the top. It ensures the film tips into being more of a pointedly satirical farce.

The contemporary resonance isn’t just “this politician is such a buffoon,” but something greater in Bong’s hands as he shows how even the most cartoonish of men can still manage to hide how woefully out of their depth they are. Where the novel is much more about the day-to-day of Mickey figuring out how he’s going to keep his secret, the film is about how the dangers of fascism can be both existentially frightening and darkly funny. The film is far from subtle in how it explores this, blowing up all of Marshall’s excesses to comedic effect, but such figures rarely are. We can see just how nakedly insecure Ruffalo’s character is at every turn, but that doesn’t stop the brutish, blustering antagonist from bringing all of the characters to the edge of annihilation. Where the novel paints him as more of an obsessive military man, the film is about showing us a more alarmingly authoritarian yet still hilariously human figure.