Warner Bros.Bing Bong, it’s Joon-ho! The hit Korean director is back for his first film since 2019 Oscars smash Parasite, but Mickey 17’s ending has left us feeling a little confused. Warning: spoilers ahead!
For starters, there are more Robert Pattinsons than we know what to do with. Before watching the new movie, it’s unclear just how many copies of him we’re going to see, each binned off after being sent on a life-threatening errand in the name of space science.
Then there’s the story itself. In true Joon-ho style, we’re not getting through this without scathing commentary and enough off-the-wall ideas to leave you dumbfounded, so the idea of the space colony inhabited with creatures that look like “croissants made of sh*t” (an actual quote and my favorite part of the movie) is only just scratching the surface.
But there’s something else that’s left us baffled too. To understand it, you’ll need to know the full Mickey 17 ending, including which Mickeys are left standing.
Mickey 17 ending is one brave sacrifice
Mickey 17 (the movie, not the clone) ends in all-out war between Kenneth Marshall’s (Mark Ruffalo) outer-space colony and creatures referred to as “Creepers.” To stop the Creepers wiping out everyone in the colony after Kenneth took a baby creeper hostage, Mickey 18 sacrifices himself to kill Kenneth and call a truce.
Warner Bros.But how did we get here? Disillusioned with life on Earth while trying to escape from a loan share he owes money to, Mickey Barnes agrees to be an “Expendable” on Kenneth Marshall’s outer-space colony mission to a planet named Nilfheim, while friend Timo (Steven Yeun) gets accepted as a legitimate pilot. As you might guess from the name, an Expendable is someone who agrees to be carbon copied by advanced technology, meaning scientists can print infinite copies of someone after they’ve died.
As we learn, Mickeys 1-16 are pretty brutally killed while doing mundane tasks in the name of science. This includes withstanding huge amounts of radiation outside the spacecraft and being a guinea pig for a vaccination that will allow humans to safely leave the ship. This brings us to Mickey 17, who we meet at the start of the movie.
He’s hanging in there as best he can. Mickey introduces us to life on the ship, his girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie), and we start to see why Kenneth and wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) are absolutely intolerable. One day, Mickey 17 should have died after being left in a cravasse ready to be eaten by Creepers. Timo writes him off and reports back to base, but the Creepers save him instead, meaning he can make his way back to safety.
Warner Bros.When he gets back to the ship, there’s an issue. Mickey 18 has already been printed, meaning there are now “Multiples.” This is basically a derogatory term given to any multiple clones made by the machine, with the “ethical” solution decided by the courts to be exterminating all clones and their memory bank (I’m skipping over some context of human cloning only being allowed in outer space because Kenneth wangled it in his favor after people hated its ethics).
The Mickeys meet, scream, and hate each other. Where Mickey 17 is docile, vulnerable, and compassionate, Mickey 18 has a chip on his shoulder and hates the world. Nasha wants to keep them both, and there’s a lot of faff between Kenneth, Ylfa, and Mickey 17’s fancy dinner he wins (which almost results in his death thanks to some sneaky testing), and a drug dealing subplot.
All hell breaks loose during one of Kenneth’s broadcasts when two Creeper babies are found on board buried in a rock Kenneth was going to use to mark their territory. Mickey 18 tries to kill Kenneth at the same time, with Kenneth’s cronies killing one of the Creepers and catching the other. Two things happen – the Mickeys are revealed as multiples when 17 catches the remaining Creeper, and the adult Creepers descend on the ship.
Basically, all they do is wail outside and insistently travel in circles, but nobody knows why. While Mickey and Nasha try to convince Kenneth and Ylfa of Creeper intelligence and compassion, Nasha also tries to defend the Mickeys’ existence. Kenneth wants to kill the Creepers with a newly-developed nerve gas, but Ylfa convinces him to send the Mickeys out to bring 100 Creeper tails back for her to make sauce with. Not enough tails and someone gets blown up.
With our just-about-surviving Creeper hanging over lava chute, single-handedly being kept alive by Nasha’s gnashers, Mickey 17 and 18 decide to find the Creeper mother, using a translator the scientists were working on. It’s old school warfare here – the Creepers want the baby returned, and an eye for an eye. Kenneth is enraged and prompts him to go outside himself with a security team to kill the creepers directly.
Here’s where we get to our Mickey 17 ending. Through grainy CCTV, 17 communicates bringing the baby to Nasha. Nasha attacks Ylfa so she can get the creeper, with a handful of security agents also rising against Kenneth’s regime in protest of their behavior. Nasha returns the Creeper to the mother at the same time Mickey 18 attacks Marshall, killing him in a murder-suicide to fulfil the mother’s request.
That’s not all of Mickey 17’s story
However, our murder-suicide isn’t actually the last scene. Mickey 17 fast-forwards to six months where Nasha has risen to a position of power in the colony. She gets rid of human cloning altogether, dramatically blowing up the machine as everyone watches on.
Warner Bros. PicturesEveryone involved in overthrowing Kenneth was originally put in the ship prison, with Timo taking down the loan crony who had tracked him onto the ship. As time passed, Nasha decided to make change in the colony, winning the election by a landslide.
Mickey 17, the only surviving clone, becomes purely Mickey Barnes, never needed on an Expendable job again. Creepers and humans seem to be co-existing too, with the team of scientists improving their translators.
Mickey is seen asking the mother whether she was bluffing about the Creepers’ ability to “explode” humans with their high-pitched wailing, learning they were indeed lying.
The dream sequence hardly makes any sense
In the middle of the ceremony, Mickey starts dreaming of Ilfa – who apparently died by suicide shortly after Kenneth’s death – printing a copy of Kenneth using a pool of his blood. Mickey can’t believe she’s real, with Ilfa tempting him to “find out,” before her hand turns to blood and he jolts away.
It’s all very tense and gripping to watch, but what does it actually mean? After much chat in the Dexerto office, we’ve decided this isn’t clear at all. In fact, the ending could do without this scene altogether.
Warner Bros.Let’s go over what it could mean. If anybody was deranged enough to be able to fake their own death and secretly mop up their dead husband’s blood to make a copy, it’s Ilfa. There’s likely an alternative universe where that actually did happen, and given there’s 18 versions of Mickey’s brain that have existed in the present timeline, other universes aren’t a stretch either.
The more boring approach is this being Mickey’s subconscious way of learning the lesson that cloning = bad and humans = complicated. There are no clean hands on or off Nilfheim, and every decision that led to the cloning machine being made has had a butterfly effect. Unfortunately, it’s also the most likely approach.
This is a Bong Joon-ho movie after all, so warped social commentary is expected. The entire film up until this point has been a societal and political critique, all of which has arguably been done better in his previous movies (ahem, Okja). It’s a weak effort, but this scene is supposed to be Joon-ho’s full stop after two hours worth of commas. Boo, white rich people who have let power go to their head! Boo ethical quandries in space! As long as you’re internally booing, that‘s what the scene means.
Mickey 17 is in cinemas now. For more, check out our lists of the best movies, best Netflix thrillers, and you can also keep tabs on the year’s other films with our 2025 movie calendar.
