Robert Pattinson’s last space sci-fi film saw the actor playing a prisoner made to serve his sentence on a shuttle hurtling toward a black hole (among other human-rights offenses, including really messed-up sexual harassment). His next space drama? Mickey 17 , a Bong Joon Ho joint based on the novel Mickey7, by Edward Ashton, which tells the story of an employee on an expedition to colonize an ice world — but he’s doing it only for the check. He is cloned so he can continue the dangerous mission, and the number 7 is a reference to how many times he dies.
Bong — who wrote, directed, and produced the film — explained the title change via an interpreter at CinemaCon. “I killed him 10 more times!” the Oscar-winning Parasite director said, per Variety . Now that the release date is approaching, we’ve gotten a glimpse at Pattinson’s death cycle in the new trailer , which also introduces a few other cast members .
Mickey explains that he wanted to get off Earth, but didn’t fully read the paperwork to understand that he was agreeing to literally become “Expendable,” with his body be reprinted after every fatal mission (this appears to be possible partly because of what looks like a cryogenic freezer in an apaprentlytricked-out MRI machine in a long, sparse room — the same one we saw in the first look last year). “Even on my 17th go around, I hate dying,” Mickey says. But somehow, an extra copy ends up staying alive.
“Why aren’t you dead?” RPatz scr.