Mickey 17

This movie has a lot to recommend it. Unfortunatey, the falults are also glaring and happen to be things that irritate me more than most. For one thing, it’s doing too many things, and not all of them well. There is class critique and environmentalism and a romance and a space opera and right wing populism and just, pick one okay? More than that, however, is it sci-fi? Not really. It doesn’t bother with any sci fi tropes or topics, treats the space travel more or less like a cross-oceanic journey for a couple of months. The cloning tech they took a little more seriously but only inasmuch as they stressed it all. Overall, the worldbuilding was very trite, and that’s an unforgivable sin for sci fi. That’s why we consume this stuff, I wanted to shout at the film, if not the director. All that nerd shit that you couldn’t be bothered with, that’s the point! Yes you can address class issues in your story, and you should if you can, but the vehicle with which you communicate your themes is incredibly important. The vehicle are the ideas, the crazy premises, the impossible tech that’s played completely straight and contended with your whole chest. What would happen if you could clone people? Would there be famine? Would people be cut up for parts? How would it affect the economy? What other applications would there be for the tech? What is the fuel? What are the incentives in play? That’s not nitpicking, that’s sci fi. And if you don’t care for that, if you're only using cloning tech as a metaphor for how dehumanized and disposable people are under capitalism, the you’re not doing sci fi, and I might hate you.