It’s definitely in the bottom three, but that isn’t that bad from eight features. Potential worse ones are Okja and Barking Dogs Never Bite. But hey, let’s answer the question of whether you can watch this movie without having seen the 16 previous movies.

Sorry, a bad joke, but someone had to do it. And probably has already. Also, there actually is a movie called Mickey One from 1965. Fifteen movies one, every four years or so, isn’t really impossible. There’s more Bond movies from similar period of time.

So, Earth is in a very bad condition and people are running away. Mickey Barnes has an additional reason to do so: He and his friend, Timo, owe money to a loan shark who is looking forward to killing them in a very convoluted way. Mickey, being desperate, having no skills and lying about having read the small print, takes up a position in a colony ship as an “expendable”. Soon enough he finds out that it means that the company has the ability to make a clone of him, memories included, and that they will use this to their advantage. Thus Mickey 17 as at that point he has already died 16 times. Then, on another planet that they plan to colonize, Mickey returns from a mission only to ifnd out that he has already been cloned and according to law, this means that he will be completely eradicated.

Now, there is some amount of interesting discussions around the reasons why this rule exists, but despite it’s prominence in the trailer, in the end it doesn’t really matter that much. And that’s kind of the problem of the movie. There is this intricate setup, but there isn’t really a payoff and actually many other elements of the movie are much more interesting.

The colony ship is run by Kenneth Marshall. He is a Trump clone and there is not attempt to hide it. He has the same weird portruding lips as Trump has when he is talking, a similar graying hair and unnecessary fake tan. He is also clearly a right-wing personality and some of the people on the ship are there just because they basically worship him, while others are there to do a job and thus find him just annoying. He is supposedly very religious, but true role of religion in his life is to be an excuse to do what he wants the way he wants to. The clergyman they have with them on the ship is just there to kiss his ass and seems to use his influence to manipulate him constantly.

His wife, Ylfa, is a different beast. She is no Melania. She is very much into the powerplays and at one point it is implied heavily, that she is in on the plan of Marshall impregnating one of the female members of the crew and that she might have been chosen to be in the crew for this very reason, although it should be pointed out that she is an “agent”, which basically means that she is security, police and firefighter at the same time.

Some of the choices for people on the ship are somewhat questionable. Since they could choose from a huge number of people, one would assume that they have the best of the best, there’s actually a lot of incompetence around. Also, despite limited resources which force them to keep food rations very tight, they also have a bunch of people who’s primary job is to make sure Marshall feels like he is appreciated and respected properly.

In the end, the problem with the movie is that despite a lot of good ideas, it doesn’t feel like a cohesive whole. I wonder whether that’s studio meddling as this is his first movie with a distributor from among the majors (Warner), unless you count Netflix, but Netflix often gives a lot of freedom to their directors or at least used to back in the days of Okja. I mean, that would be typical for studios. You contract a recognized master, who’s last movie won him three personal Oscars from the major categories, including Best Picture, and then you drown him under notes.

You can see why he did take on the project, as it does have themes of class, environmentalism, understanding other cultures and so forth, but it also feels like he didn’t quite achieve what he wanted. At the same time, it is nice to see him flex his muscles and make use of bigger budgets every once in a while. I do hope he gets back to his smaller movies. Maybe take on the classic “one for them, one for me” model of Scorsese and his ilk.