Christian Holub is a writer covering comics and other geeky pop culture. He's still mad about 'Firefly' getting canceled.
Robert Pattinson's next movie has a whole lot of Robert Pattinson. As the first trailer for Mickey 17 shows, Pattinson plays a character who gets cloned over and over again as part of exploring the dangerous terrain of an alien planet. Every time Mickey dies, a new one gets created with all his predecessors' memories -- and he dies a lot. In this trailer alone, we see him drown in icy water, fall into a frozen ravine, and get shot, to name a few.
"Hey Mickey, what's it like to die?" Multiple other characters ask over the course of the new trailer. But despite his prolific experience with the phenomenon, Mickey doesn't have a ready answer. At the very least, it doesn't get any easier with repetition. "Even on my 17th go around, I hate dying," Mickey says.
"Hi Mickey, are you experiencing any vertigo?" asks a female automated sounding voice, to which Mickey responds, "I guess I am feeling a little dizzy" just as his hand is chopped off by space debris, and it just floats along, passing by a window filled with other space travelers just having coffee. No big deal. And that's exactly what Mickey dying over... and over...and over is: no big deal to anyone, except Mickey. Bemoaning how much he hates dying, the trailer also sees Mickey finding another Mickey, discovering he's one of multiples.
Just looking at the titles, there is a noticeable difference between Mickey7 and Mickey 17. The number in his name refers to the number of times Mickey, who is known as an "Expendable," has died and been reprinted in a new body, so that everyone can keep track. "I kill him 10 times more," Bong said at CinemaCon earlier this year to explain the title change.
But we shouldn't necessarily take the title as definitive, either. Pattinson was also at CinemaCon in April to tease the movie alongside Bong, where he discussed the challenges of making each Mickey distinct and seemed to suggest there may actually be more than 17 clones.
"Mickey 17 is someone who has the lowest expectations of his life, and yet the world keeps pushing those expectations, to the point where he has a job that tortures him every day," Pattinson said then. "And then 18 comes along, and he's got frontal lobe damage and no self-control, libido out of control. It's like playing an evil brother or twin."
After making his name as vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight movies, Pattinson recently returned to blockbuster filmmaking with 2022's The Batman, and is set to reprise his role as the Dark Knight in a superhero sequel set for 2026. But he clearly hasn't lost his taste for odder genre projects like this one.
"I've been the biggest fan of Bong for many, many years; he's my hero," Pattinson said at CinemaCon. "I thought it was the most unusual, bizarre, funny script."