Similar to Parasite, Mickey 17 is ultimately about the ethics of revolutionary struggle. The film considers how Christian morality — especially as understood by thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, or Karl Marx, the latter of whom famously referred to religion as the “opiate” of the masses — prevents the downtrodden from standing up for their rights. Here, Pattinson’s Mickey is a clear stand-in for Christ and the model Christian. Resurrected ad infinitum, he humbly accepts the pain, suffering, and dehumanization inflicted on him by his apathetic, at times downright demonic coworkers as punishment for his perceived sins: hurting a frog in his high school biology class, causing the car accident that killed his mother.
In addition to rising from the dead, Mickey resembles Christ insofar as his lethal exposure to Niflheim’s atmosphere allows the scientists on board the spaceship to develop a vaccine. In other words, Mickey dies — more than once — so that the others can live and, mirroring Christ’s own fate, receives little to no thanks from those he rescues. On the contrary, many consider Mickey’s regeneratable body to be an abomination, even a “work of Satan.” To complete the comparison, Bong includes a shot of a dying Mickey being held by his girlfriend, Nasha, evoking the pietà: that ubiquitous subject in Roman Catholic art, showing the Virgin Mary cradling Christ after his descent from the cross.
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