For most people, the film “Mickey 17” is a one-time watch. Maybe I would have passed it by myself, but I decided to do a review of it because some of the ideas embedded in this film intersect with my own thoughts. So, “Mickey 17” is a science fiction film by director Bong Joon Ho, the author of “Parasites.” Although this film is not only about science or fiction, but also about society, man and moral choice.
One of the most obvious plot branches is politics: power, the cult of personality and blind faith. This storyline is so obvious and has been used so often lately that it’s not worth dwelling on it too much. I’ll just note that the director accompanies it with satire and, in places, dystopia. And, of course, Mark Ruffalo in the image of a villain-ruler looks very unusual and very interesting indeed.
If we move on to the main story of the film, it includes the theme of cloning people and creating their copies. Sooner or later, we will most likely reach such a level of development that we will be able to digitize our brains, and therefore create a complete copy of a person — both mental and visual. The director reminds us that we are not yet ready for this, since we have not developed any attitude to such a phenomenon — neither from the point of view of legal norms, nor, moreover, from a moral, ethical and philosophical point of view. What to do if one of the copies committed murder or another crime? How will the existence of copies affect relations between people and our lives? We do not yet have answers to all these questions, and we are unlikely to get them in the near future. However, no matter how many copies are created, no one wants to die, and everyone is equally scared, because each copy is, in a way, a full-fledged life.
The last question I would like to touch upon slightly in this analysis is the topic of colonizing other planets. What should it be like and how should it happen? Is it possible to destroy other species, even primitive ones, in order to preserve your own? And where is the line between the survival of humanity and the right to exist of other forms of life?
