Mickey 17 (2025): Loving the Copy

Spoiler warning: This post contains thematic and plot details from Mickey 17 (2025).

Loving All Versions

What does it mean to love someone completely, not just who they were, but who they might have been, who they became by accident, who they never meant to be? To hold the person they dreamed of becoming, the person they feared, and the person they never imagined, all in the same embrace?

Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s ambitious and uneven sci-fi meditation on identity and expendability, wobbles at times. Its tone slips between satire, surrealism, and sincerity. Yet at its emotional core is something quietly profound: the idea that to love fully is to embrace multiplicity, to recognize that the self is not one thing but many, layered and shifting.

Copies and Selves

We meet Mickey as an “expendable,” a man whose very job is to die repeatedly for the good of a colonizing mission, then be resurrected from a stored backup. He is treated less like a person than a tool; his memories are useful, his suffering irrelevant.

When a backup fails, a version of Mickey is printed incomplete, missing the latest transfer. A glitch, nothing more. Yet like lightning sparking in primordial soup, that glitch becomes genesis. A self not quite planned, not quite continuous, but still alive.

The new Mickey does not know how he died. He is not haunted by every scar. He seems unfinished, but he is also free of burdens the other cannot shed. Which is the “real” Mickey? The one who remembers death, or the one who lives without it?

Love Without Division

The most tender gesture in the film is not its politics or its world-building, but the woman who loves both Mickeys. She loves all of them, even the versions glimpsed only in brief deaths. She does not treat them as a moral dilemma or a tragedy. She sees them all, recognizes something shared, and offers her love not as division but as embrace.

The fact that two versions exist at once is only a new wrinkle in an old truth. She has been loving iterations the whole time. This one simply answers back. She does not falter, she adapts. Her love does not shrink, it expands.

This could easily have been played as farce, or as an ethical puzzle. Instead it becomes an act of grace, a quiet recognition that love is capacious enough to hold contradictions.

Surreal Gestures, Quiet Grace

Along the way, Bong indulges in strangeness. A dinner of artificial meat, consumed with religious awkwardness. A snail-like alien species, underestimated yet crucial, revealing humanity’s blind spots. Politicians bluster. Systems dehumanize. And still, the most meaningful action comes not in spectacle but in intimacy: one Mickey saving another, not because he must but because he can.

Even the glitch that caused the duplicate, an accidental kick of a cable, becomes poetic in hindsight. It is not the soul escaping, but a new path opening. Not all change is chosen; sometimes the self reroutes by chance, and that too deserves to live.

The Ending of Mickey 17

Viewers may ask what the ending of Mickey 17 means. On its surface, the film does make a choice: one Mickey sacrifices himself so the other can live. Yet the sacrifice is not framed as elimination, but as recognition. In that moment, Mickey does not see his copy as a rival to be erased, but as a sibling worth saving. The act affirms that identity is not singular, but relational—that what matters is not which Mickey survives, but the love and grace that allow one to give himself for the other.

Multiplicity as Meaning

This is not a clean film. It rushes past its most interesting questions, its tone sometimes uneasy. Yet it dares to suggest that personhood is more fluid than we admit. Identity is not a single thread. It is a braid of near-selves, constantly slipping and rejoining, sometimes contradicting, always reshaping.

The moment Mickey looks at his copy and sees not a rival but a sibling, the film moves from science fiction to allegory. And when his partner says yes to them both—not to fantasy, but to the messy sum of who they are—that yes is enough.

Not every story needs a neat conclusion. But sometimes it leaves you with a thought worth holding on to:

To be loved in full is not to be chosen. It is to be known in all your forms, and still belong.

Explore more film essays in the Film Reflections collection.