With Predator: Killer of Killers coming out this weekend, I’ve started in the rewatch of the movies, beginning with 2022’s Prey (which is fantastic; more on this later). The prep has necessitated a slight revision to the WYCU timeline, which we talked about here.
Adding in the new releases, plus the Blade Runner franchise and the chronological year, and our WYCU now looks like this:
I hold to a rather simple opinion : you can’t be movie of the year if the audience is looking at their watch at the 60 minute mark and wondering if they should leave.
And this is where I found myself at that precise point while watching Sinners (2025).
Don’t get me wrong: Sinners is a fine movie, but the pacing – especially in the first half – was atrocious. Reflecting on the movie after it finished, this was the overall feeling I got. The music was fantastic, and I would have loved to see more or it; the effects were well done. But the slow build and unnecessary bloat brought it down. The denouement felt interminable, on the levels of The Return of the King as well.
I enjoyed seeing the Buddy Guy cameo (which I don’t think is much of a spoiler at this point), and wish he had been present throughout, in some way, shape or form. But overall, I thought getting to the Juke joint faster would have made for a better flick as a whole. Let’s give it a 7/10, as far as ratings go.
If there is a better metaphor for 2025 than an alien hunter preying on humanity, well, it’s probably found over in an episode of Andor, but the Predator from the WYCU is a close second.
We were literally just talking about this as we were laying out our watch guide for the WYCU about a month ago, so imagine our glee when this showed up on the tubes:
So it looks like Predator: Badlands will be joining our rewatch of the WYCU taking place this summer. And while I originally had some plans to slot it in chronologically, with the November 7th release date just announced we may just have to circle back to it once we’re gotten through to the end of the Aliens part of the franchise.
(As always, we’ll see how those publication times go with the podcast.)
There will be some spoilers in this review and commentary about the recent film.
Do you ever go to a theatre and see a movie with incredible potential but it doesn’t quite reach it, it doesn’t take that next step to get where it needs to be to reach that level of greatness?
Mickey 17 (2025) movie poster
That was my experience with Mickey 17 (2025), a movie I enjoyed, with a great concept and cast, and had so many things go for it, but it felt like it was holding back, and this made it a “smaller” film than it could have been, if it really wanted to take some of the ideas that it was exploring up to the next level.
The political commentary in the film was on the nose, which is remarkable given how long ago this would have likely been in pre-production* and development to nail that, but it seems almost restrained compared to current events that we’re dealing with right now (in April of 2025).
We also see continuing elements of class and social commentary that Bong Joon Ho has had in his other films like Parasite (2019) and Snowpiercer (2013), and there’s a lot of similarities with Snowpiercer in this film. They’re both deeply chilling movie in the same way, and this only is in part due to the winter environment that’s an existential threat that forces humanity in on itself. Hmmm. Probably a paper there needed to unpack all that.
However, the part where the movie hit a wall for me is with the implications of the 3D printing tech and the memory storage: it didn’t take it far enough and explore what it could actually do – it took it to a certain point and just stopped, which is unfortunate, as other movies with similar themes like Edge of Tomorrow (2014) or Westworld (1973) and Futureworld (1976) (or the 2016 HBO series) where we have that printing technology going on explored it better, and I think that speaks to some of the films limitations.
One of the ways Mickey 17 falls short is in the portrayal of the 3D-printing technology and the way it is integrated within society. The tech itself comes across as both silly and kinda dorky in the way it’s implemented, with the slow emergence like from a dot matrix printer in the 1990s to the fully-completed form. This is where Leeloo’s build in The Fifth Element (1997) or the hosts emerging from the vat in Westworld (2016) feel more fully realized. The silliness of the process works, in so far that it also highlight the somewhat bizarre way that this future society treats the implications of this tech. So many questions remain poorly answered by the film: why only one person per ship as an Expendable? Why not multiples for each role on the ship (or at least for the combat, exploration, and scout crews?) Why limit what is essentially nigh-immortality to a very limited underclass? Why would the ultra-wealthy not jump on this very tech? (Though this last point is kinda hinted at in the dream sequence in the epilogue). This silliness brings Mickey 17 more in line with other films like Prometheus (2012), and to be honest, I’ve never really enjoyed movies that kick around the idiot ball.
Some of this is answered, though not to my satisfaction, in the presentation of the Expendables and Multiples in the film. The religious proscription against having more than one, and the way they are treated. And of course, the use of the gun as the final commitment to the process (similar to dog in Kingsman (2015)) may be a bridge too far, though one that the crews of Starfleet have long since overcome. (The argument about whether the transporter kills the user or not having gone on for ages.) If one is already on the upper tier of society, would one be willing to risk it all to achieve this pseudo-immortality?
It might be too much to give up, as the process isn’t exactly perfect. We learn in the second act that there are variations in various duplicates, as they emerge from the printer. Whether this is due to the somewhat less that rigorous process of printing and downloading that occurs by the medical team – who remind one of a collection of grad students in a lab, rather than the most top-notch team out there – or due to some natural variations in the printing process is unexplained. There is a lot of difference in the repetition, and this variance might not be appealing to the ultra-wealthy that would be demanding a greater degree to fidelity in the transfers, much as was seen in the aforementioned Westworld in its later seasons.
Ultimately Mickey 17 is a love story. Despite the difference in each iteration of the various Mickeys, each one of them is loved by Nasha, who he loves in turn. Their meet cute happens early in the movie, and it’s love at first site, a love that endures through each reprinting of Mickey. His love for her is constant (and she does change and grow through the movie too – the role she plays at the end of the film is not who we see at the beginning – as is her love for him, throughout all the different foibles and flaws of the many personalities that are printed.
Though there some throughlines, some continuity in the bedrock personality, which is why Mickey 18 makes the sacrifice play late in the film, despite the wildly different personality from 17. Props to Robert Pattinson for pulling off making the same character feel different in Mickey’s varied iterations.
Final thoughts: Mickey 17 is well crafted, there isn’t any misses in the production aspects of it, though some of the satire misses due to the low-key nature of it. I want to see the Luc Besson version of Mickey 17, that takes the premise and goes all out.
*: apparently this is an adaptation**, which I had heard about going in but hadn’t checked the book out. Also, the book was published in 2022, and adapted shortly after, and was originally delayed in release from it’s original set date in 2024. So the political stuff is even more poignant, or perhaps sadly, more eternal.
**: also, in looking at the wiki after writing the above, the short story was also an exploration of the Star Trek teleporter paradox, so… hmm, yeah.
A few weeks ago, we laid out the timeline for the Weyland-Yutani Cinematic Universe, the WYCU, and in the footnotes we mentioned the rumours of an unnamed Predator project due to come out in 2025.
And this week, that rumour was confirmed:
We have Season 4 of Deadliest Warrior coming out on June 6th. Predator:KoK is set up as an anthology movie, with three arcs, following Vikings, Samurai, and WWII US fighter pilots (in what looks to be the Pacific theatre). Interesting alternatives, and I’m really excited to see how they come to the screen.
This should land somewhere in the middle of our WYCU rewatch, so we’ll likely step back for a special episode to cover it during the middle of our chronology.
Join us online as we shout “Who… Is… Deadliest?” at the screen and online.
