The Novum of "Mickey 17" (dir Bong Joon Ho, 2025)

Spoiler-17 review

Take your premise, your SFnal novum—take a few, indeed: a spaceship-full of colonists on their way to settle an icy exoplanet called Niflheim; aboriginal alien creatures that look like gigantic hairy woodlice. But take this major premise: technology now exists to upload a person’s consciousness and memories to a data storage device (you’re not taking your premise too seriously, so this device is a housebrick), and also to scan a person’s body and then to 3D-print out a brand new body, into which that consciousness and those memories can be reinserted. In effect you have invented immortality: scan a person at 20 (say), and when they age and die, print them out again at 20 with perfect continuity of mind. Keep doing this for as long as you like. Or: print out a hundred versions of you, and send them out into world to have wild adventures. So, we’re an immortal species now. Maybe this technology is expensive: it seems like it would be. So maybe the wealthy horde it: being rich is endless youth and a cure for death itself; being poor is mortality and grind. That would be an interesting set-up for a story. Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon goes somewhere in that direction (though Morgan doesn’t invoke 3D printing).

That’s not the direction Bong Joon Ho takes the premise in Mickey 17, his new movie (set to be released in 2024, delayed for some reason, now out in 2025 and soon to stream).