This article contains minor spoilers for Mickey 17. If you’ve seen the trailers, there’s nothing here that you don’t know already.
In Mickey 17, Robert Pattinson plays, well, Mickey 17. He plays Mickeys 1-16, too. Oh, and also Mickey 18. That’s because in Bong Joon-ho’s big-budget sci-fi movie, Mickey is a regular guy who signs up to become an expendable.
No, not a member of Sylvester Stallone’s all-star action hero crew. In this world, an expendable is a person who agrees to have their DNA and memories replicated, so they can be cloned back to life after each death. Each time, a new body is 3D printed for Mickey, and his memories and consciousness are uploaded to his recycled meat from a hard drive the size and shape of a brick.
Now that I think about it, the concept has strong Nier: Automata energy.
What’s The Point Of Life After Death?
What’s the benefit of this? Well, some jobs are really dangerous, and it helps to have a worker who has waived their right to safety, who can be thrown into life-threatening situations over and over without their employer needing to worry about losing a hefty investment. This is a particularly useful kind of worker to have on the kind of deep space voyage Mickey finds himself on as the film begins.
He can be sent out onto the surface of Niflheim — an ice-covered potential new home for humanity— to breathe in the air and test if it’s hazardous for humans. Scientists can use him to test the granular effects of radiation poisoning on a living human body. And on, and on. If (read: when) he dies, so what? He feels pain until he passes, then he’s printed out again, good as new, and ready to report for duty.
It’s a testament to Mickey 17 as a work of science fiction that I found myself thinking about how useful it would be to have expendables in situations like this, and less about the horrific workers’ rights violations the job would necessarily entail.
The more I sit with Mickey 17, the more I realize expendables are basically just video game characters. As we play through a game and make mistakes, they die, over and over. But they’re reborn, good as new, at the last checkpoint. Some games, like Borderlands, BioShock, and Journey to the Savage Planet, even use the same sci-fi framing as Mickey 17, with clones emerging from pods at the start of each new attempt.
Like Mickey, game characters look and behave the same. In other ways, the player is Mickey, not the character. We maintain the consciousness that the character would lose. Does Nathan Drake remember that failing to jump at this precise moment previously left him a kebab at the bottom of a spike pit? No. But I do, and I use the lesson I learned to inform how the character behaves going forward. In that way, Mickey 17’s expendables are a fusion of player and character, acquired knowledge and reflexive action.
Mickey 64
It has me thinking that you could make a pretty cool Mickey 17 game — though you might expect to lose what makes the movie special in the process. If Mickey dies and is born again over and over in a game, wouldn’t he be the same as any other video game character? Well, no, I don’t think so. The cloning framework has the potential to go beyond the set dressing for traditional respawning that it has been used as in the past.
Hades, for my money, still has the best storytelling in any roguelike. Zagreus’ loop of venturing into the underworld, fighting until he’s killed, then returning to the House of Hades to talk to his friends — some of whom may have been responsible for his death a couple runs earlier — takes his mortal immortality into account. Deaths are threads woven into his continuing story, not loose ends that resurrection ties off.
A Mickey 17 game could use death in a similar way, with each demise sending you back to the 3D printer. You could go back to your room to see your girlfriend, Nasha, build relationships with other voyagers, accept smaller quests around the ship, then brave the cold for another inevitable death on Niflheim. Maybe you spend your time researching the local flora and fauna. Maybe you get sent on pointless missions that will quickly kill you. Whatever happens, Mickey progresses with each death; still the same guy, now with the experience of excruciating pain under his belt.
A game could also tie in the danger of a double getting loose. In the film, two clones existing simultaneously is grounds for the expendable’s final termination. A game could play into this, making doubles a high risk, high reward bonus. You could accomplish double the tasks, but you would risk a permanent game over (or something negative, but less extreme).
However you slice it, Mickey 17 could be a great, compelling game that explores death in a new way. It helps that it’s already a great, compelling movie that does the same.
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