Review: Mickey7

Mickey7 by Edward Ashton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this book up after hearing that it was the source material for Bong Joon-Ho’s next movie, starring Robert Pattinson - a pretty quick turnaround, given that the book just came out this year, started filming this summer, and is expected in theaters next year. Assuming, of course, the current bloody bellend regime at WB don’t screw over the auteurs. The premise sounded like a pretty nice update to Duncan Jones’s amazing minimalist movie Moon - you know, the one where Sam Rockwell meets his recycled self. And it promises a pretty similar style to the works of Andy Weir, sci fi with a snarky twist.

On that level, it delivers enough where I can see why Bong picked this project - it provokes thoughts of the kind he typically likes to present in his most famous films, thoughts of the damage done by capitalism and war to the environment and the universe. And, with its setting insulated from a potentially dangerous icy world, I feel like Bong perhaps thought this would be his chance to revisit the aesthetic of Snowpiercer with far more Auteur License to protect him from the menace of hacky sack studio heads (at least Zaslav isn’t a Weinstein predator, but who knows? He’s such a cartoon villain already, I wouldn’t be surprised.)

I do feel, though, that this book would absolutely work better on the silver screen, not only because of Bong writing and directing, but also because it doesn’t quite fulfill its potential as written. It’s pretty short for a book with meaty ethical questions at its core, and as a result, the worldbuilding is surprisingly piecemeal and scattershot. We get random bits and pieces about why humanity is the way it is, struggling to colonize increasingly strange new worlds, but it’s not super cohesive. There’s also the fact that the villain adheres to an in universe religious movement, the Natalists, but I still couldn’t tell you what exactly they are. I feel like what few details we got of their tenets are thinly plotted and even contradictory - do they want to be fruitful and multiply? Do they believe only humans deserve to reproduce? Hard to say, though it’ll be very interesting to see how Mark Ruffalo portrays Marshall in the movie since that character seems so opposite to his own self.

At least, for all the limits this book’s length places on it, there’s already a sequel planned. My question is, though - is Bong only going to adapt this one? Because I feel like he’d be averse to franchise work enough that he’d probably be better off adapting the sequel into the same film. Which, let’s be honest, from what I’ve seen of Book 2, it feels like the two books really should’ve been one from the start.

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