Mickey 17 (2025)

Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) was surprised to wake up.  He found himself at the bottom of a snow-covered crevasse on the planet Niflheim.  How could he get out?  Luckily, his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) arrived.  Timo was surprised that Mickey wasn't dead yet; he had only come looking for Mickey's weapon, which was on a ledge above.  Leaving Mickey to his fate, Timo left.  How did he come to this?

Mickey and Timo had borrowed money from a shady character to launch a business.  It had failed spectacularly, and the lender intended to recoup his losses by carving the pair of them into pieces with a chainsaw.  In order to escape this fate, Mickey and Timo signed onto a colony ship bound for a distant planet.  Where Timo had a skill that earned him a spot - the waiting list was long, Mickey did not.  He volunteered to be an expendable.  He was given all the dangerous work.  If he died, a newly printed clone would take his place.  So far, he had died 16 times, making his current incarnation Mickey 17.

Mickey has a girlfriend, Nasha (Naomi Ackie).  The colony ship is led by Ken Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a buffoonish congressman who lost his election so he paraphrased Davy Crockett: "You can go to hell -- I'm going to Niflheim."  His wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), is no smarter that her dull-witted husband, but she encourages him in his stupidity.  Yes, this is supposed to be a dark comedy, but the idiocy of these villains is pathetic, not funny.

It was hard to like Mickey.  He comes across as a hapless victim.  The laughs are few and far between.  Mickey falling naked out of the printer because no one put the print tray in place proved to be a repeated joke.  Oh, so funny.  Ugh.  Some of the world building was cool, notably the explanation of how cloning was outlawed on Earth and how the only exception for cloning was if the previous incarnation was dead, thus Mickey's loophole for regular resurrection.  Of course, Mickey 17 surviving the fall into the crevasse and returning to the colony ship resulted in a multiples violation.  The Nasha and the Mickeys demonstrated stupidity in trying to resolve this issue before they could get caught.  Ugh.

Disappointing.  Skip.

Stowaway (2021)

The crew of the MTS-42 are set for a two-year mission to Mars.  There is mission commander Marina Barnett (Toni Collette), biologist David Kim (Daniel Dae Kim), and medical researcher Zoe Leverson (Anna Kendrick).  They have hardly begun their Mars Transfer orbit when Barnett discovers blood on the floor.  After unscrewing a panel, a man falls on her, breaking her arm.  The man is unconscious.  However, he had a badge that identifies him as Michael Adams (Shamier Anderson), a launch support engineer.  Unfortunately, the carbon-dioxide scrubber was damaged beyond repair and the ship cannot support everyone all the way to Mars.  The one potential solution is deemed too risky.  While Barnett and Kim are resigned to tossing Adams out of an airlock, Zoe is determined to save him.  The risky solution would have them climb the tether to the counterbalance that provides the artificial gravity.  It may have unused liquid oxygen.  Zoe is determined to try.

The movie only has the four characters.  There are no scenes with ground control.  In fact, all the conversations with ground control are one-sided since you cannot hear what ground control is saying.  Very different from Apollo 13.  Zoe is the central character and Anna Kendrick does a good job in the role.

There were some things that were annoying.  How did Michael get sealed behind a panel?  One expects a story about him sneaking aboard and having a cohort seal him in.  Nope, he just accidentally got stuck behind a panel where the mission critical life support system was housed.  Okay.  Speaking of the mission critical life support system, why is there no backup?  They couldn't even jury rig a fix.  Why weren't they using some sort of tether when doing their spacewalk?  They have special equipment to climb the tether but nothing to attach them if they slip.  Gah!  Since the stowaway angle was hardly explored, the movie could just as easily have been the same system failure that required all the same steps.  The stowaway angle added little beyond knowing which person was likely to get spaced.  Finally, why did the man have to be pathetic?  During the launch, he vomits in a bag.  When transferring to the space station, Zoe carries his bag.  When climbing the tether, he's winded and clumsy.  And it wasn't just him.  Michael is too uncoordinated to help.  Save us, strong woman, save us!  Ugh!

There were too many inconvenient coincidences to make the story work.  It looks good and the ship is cool, but the plot is too much of a stretch.  The plot holes just grated.  Skip.

Hereditary

Hereditary opens with a family heading to a funeral for Annie's mother.  Annie (Toni Collette) gives a eulogy that outlines her very difficult relationship with her secretive mother.  It is a eulogy that makes you wonder why she even bothered.  Annie is an artist.  She makes miniature houses complete with furniture and people.  She has a bad habit of creating scenes from her life in miniature, which adds a creepy vibe to the movie and gives an insight to Annie's mental state.

 

Steve (Gabriel Byrne) is Annie's husband.  He's a solid fellow who is somehow coping with an increasingly unstable wife and grief-stricken family.  Peter (Alex Wolf) is the older child, a pot-smoking flake who is lost and directionless.  Charlie (Milly Shapiro) is the younger child and she is obviously not quite right.  She makes dark art, thinks nothing of dismembering a dead bird, and is hardest hit by her grandmother's death.

 

There are some scary moments but mostly it is predictable drivel.  The characters are too often blind to the obvious and march straight to their well-deserved doom.  There are parts that make no sense.  What hospital would send an unconscious youth home with his parents who then proceed to carry them between them like a sack of potatoes?  Why is Peter constantly on his cell phone early in the movie but, when things go sideways, he has no phone?  All cell phones just vanish in the later half of the film because that would be too easy.  The ending is reminiscent of The Witch, where the forces of evil triumph and the last member of the family numbly accepts it.  And that is weird too.  If the end was the goal, some of the scares and incidents of the middle become counter-productive.

Skip this one.