“Mickey 17” opened at the weekend and there’s something uncannily familiar about its premise. While nobody could describe director Bong Joon-Ho’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning “Parasite” as a clone of the low-fi sci-fi classic “Moon”, both films riff on the same basic idea: a human meeting an exact duplicate of themselves.
Spoilers ahead for Moon and Mickey 17! You have been warned.
In Duncan Jones’ 2009 debut “Moon”, that man is Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell), a technician reaching the end of his lonely three-year posting on the dark side of the moon. “Not since Adam has any human known such solitude as [Apollo 11 command module pilot] Mike Collins is experiencing during this 47 minutes of each lunar revolution,” said a NASA mission log back in 1969, and Bell is living that isolation 24/7.
His mission? Mining helium-3, a clean source of energy that has rejuvenated planet Earth.
Fate intervenes, however, while Bell is preparing to make the long journey home to his wife and daughter. His rover is crushed under rocks during a routine check on a helium-3 harvester, and the next thing we know he’s being treated in the Sarang base’s infirmary by his only companion, a robot called GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey). When Bell subsequently takes an unauthorized trip outside, he discovers a man with a very familiar face trapped in a lunar rover. To borrow a quote from John Travolta in “Face/Off”, it’s like looking in a mirror… only not.
Jones wrote the story (the screenplay is credited to Nathan Parker) with Rockwell in mind, having previously discussed another sci-fi project, “Mute”, with the actor. Rockwell didn’t want to play the role Jones had in mind for him but was open to working with a first-time movie director who’d cut his teeth on commercials and music videos. (Jones went on to make “Mute” with Alexander Skarsgård and Paul Rudd in 2018. Rockwell had an uncredited cameo as Bell.)
“We just started talking about what kind of roles as an actor did he want to do, and what films did we both enjoy,” Jones told Den of Geek back in 2009. “We started talking about the science fiction films of the late ’70s and ’80s, films like ‘Outland’, ‘Silent Running’ and Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’, where you’d have these science fiction films but with blue-collar sensibilities, that were much more character-driven. I said at the end of that meeting that I’m going to go away and write something for you.”
Jones handed Rockwell a script for “Moon” nine months later and it’s easy to see why the actor signed up. He would go on to win an Oscar for “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” in 2017, but his performance (or should that be performances?) here are just as award-worthy.
Although they’re superficially the same man, Rockwell gives the two Sams subtly different outlooks and personalities. Meanwhile, the production team used a seamless mix of motion-control cameras, body doubles and CG face replacements to create the illusion of the two Sams chatting, fighting, and even playing ping-pong against themselves.
The storytelling tour de force goes way beyond illusions, however. Thanks to some clever narrative sleight-of-hand, it turns out that the Sam Bell who’s just woken up in the infirmary is actually a replacement clone activated to replace the man marooned in the rover. Eagle-eyed viewers may have spotted that the hand OG Sam scalds early in the film has miraculously recovered, one of many clever visual clues to Sam’s duplicate nature. Another is the repeated use of Chesney Hawkes’ 1991 hit “The One and Only” as the song the Sams wake up to each morning.
Despite their initial hostility towards one another (Sam 2.0 is significantly angrier) they gradually work out that their employers at Lunar Industries (represented by future MCU sorcerer Benedict Wong and What We Do in the Shadows’ Matt Berry) have been rather economical with the truth. The communications antenna isn’t, as they claim, damaged — instead, radio signals are being intentionally blocked — and every communication “received” from Sam’s wife and their young daughter is pre-recorded, destined to be repeated again and again as each new iteration of Sam embarks on his tour of duty. All memories of his life back on Earth have been implanted by the company.
There’s also a tragic edge to the story. When new Sam finally makes contact with Earth, his now-teenage daughter tells him that his wife has passed away, as the “real” Sam talks in the background. He then watches his OG counterpart’s body breaking down as they realize that the three-year contract is actually a three-year lifespan, and that the pod promising to transport them home is actually an incinerator. New Sam’s mission subsequently becomes a race against time to escape the base so he can blow the whistle on Lunar’s practices before a clean-up crew arrives.
“Moon” hails from a glorious tradition of low-budget sci-fi, turning its meager $5 million price tag into a strength rather than a weakness. Indeed, it could almost work as a one-set stage play if it weren’t for the fact that you’d need identical twins to play the two roles.
GERTY is as simple as robots get, essentially just a functional white box whose only personality comes from the emojis displayed on its tiny computer screen – by comparison, R2-D2 looks like one of “Blade Runner”‘s replicants. The pristine white sets provide an austere, ’70s-like vision of the future, while the CG-enhanced models used to create vehicles on the lunar service are a wonderful reminder of a time when practical crafts were at the heart of sci-fi. The earwormy score, from “Requiem for a Dream”‘s Clint Mansell, follows a similar no-frills brief as it rotates around a few simple notes on a piano.
In terms of both scale and tone, “Mickey 17” (based on Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel “Mickey 7”) exists in an entirely different universe to “Moon”. Bong’s movie is a big-budget sci-fi comedy about a mismatched group of people — led by amoral politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) — on a mission to colonize the alien world of Niflheim. Their spaceship is big enough to accommodate a guy dressed as a giant pigeon. Meanwhile, Mickey himself (Robert Pattinson) is a different type of clone, a sophisticated photocopy of the original splurged out by a state-of-the-art 3D printer.
And yet, for all the differences in the packaging, both Jones and Bong explore very similar themes. Neither society knows how to handle two clones coming face-to-face, and goes to extraordinary lengths — mostly involving murder — to prevent it from happening. But the two films also ask bigger questions about the ethics of a society creating artificial people to do the jobs you don’t want to, whether it’s full-time Expendable Mickey signing up to become a human crash test dummy, or manning your lunar base with short-lived clones because it’s more economically viable than sending a succession of ordinary people to the lunar surface.
The two films effectively follow paths of divergent evolution, using very different approaches to come up with very similar answers. After all, even clones have their differences.
“Moon” is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video in the UK and Fubo in the US. “Mickey 17” is in theaters now.