The new dystopian space race Exploitation goes extraterrestial

This week, two NASA astronauts stranded in space since June returned to Earth thanks to a craft from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. As the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency shutters NASA offices, billionaire space privateers like Musk and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos are likely to expand their role. That holds great promise: competition and the profit motive do catalyze innovation and productivity, as even Marx recognised.

But it could also turn the final frontier into another zone of hyper-exploitation — a grim possibility probed by Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho’s new political satire set in space, Mickey 17, whose villain is a hybrid of Musk and Donald Trump.

As the SpaceX craft plummeted back to its Florida landing spot, dolphins jumped sweetly out of the water to greet it. The scene was so beautifully cinematic, it could well have served as the opening of Mickey 17. In it, Joon Ho imagines a future that we already live in: where exploited labourers (here referred to as “expendable clones”) serve at the whims of a short-tempered oligarch whose devoted “followers” have eagerly joined his space flight.

Our protagonist is Mickey, played by Robert Pattinson, and since he is essential to the ship’s mission, no one questions his pain and suffering, least of all himself. As he dies over and over in excruciating pain in clone form — his body freezes, he loses a hand, he is poisoned while being tested for a new vaccine — this is treated as routine. He did, after all, sign up for the job. Eager to leave behind his debts on Earth, he confesses with a smile that he might have scrutinised the paperwork more closely. The ship’s onlookers laugh knowingly at each death: silly, sweet Mickey, making all our lives safer, smoother, more efficient.

About 20 minutes into the film, it becomes clear that Joon Ho thought Trump was going to lose the 2024 election. Mark Ruffalo plays the failed congressman Kenneth Marshall, who hosts an inflight reality competition show and was so humiliated by losing his “re-election campaign” that he leaves Earth to colonise space. An attempted assassination only brings him back stronger. As his followers chant the name of their leader, they stick their arms up in the air, one finger pointing at the sky, echoing a Nazi salute (ahem, “Roman salute”). His wife, the unnervingly poised Toni Collette, resembles Melania in the least charitable interpretation. At one point, when her husband is about to kill Mickey, she screams and screams; but it is not for Mickey, rather at the thought of a bullet hole in her lovely carpet. 

Bong Joon Ho says the character isn’t inspired by Musk and Trump, but by a range of “dictators we have seen throughout history”, which would be hard to believe even if Marshall’s supporters didn’t wear red MAGA-style baseball hats that say “the one and only”. There’s no Kenneth Marshall in the book the film is based on; the novel’s autocrat, Hieronymus, is more a maniacal military soldier than an eccentric billionaire. But in the movie version, he wants to colonise space, make babies with the women on board with “the ideal genetics”, and he’s constantly throwing tantrums. Sounds pretty familiar.

Satire succeeds best when it touches a nerve of truth. Parasite, Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning film from 2019, exploded the fantasy of upward mobility by showing an upper-class family’s vampiric relationship to their servants. Its bloody conclusion is a depressing catharsis of just how little hope there is for improving your chances. But where Parasite benefited from a subtle touch — the social critique unfolded gradually to reveal a horrifying picture of the real world — Mickey 17 can be too on-the-nose, at times resembling Saturday Night Live at its flaccid worst. 

The Marshall character slides between impressions of Musk and his ostensible government boss, Trump. Writing Mickey 17 three years ago, Joon Ho couldn’t have known how powerful a role Musk would be playing in the current administration, but his determined plans to colonise space have long been clear. The SpaceX boss’s ultimate mission is to “occupy Mars” and develop a city of 1 million people there in the next two to three decades. He has volunteered his own sperm to get the population going, and he wants to retire on the Red Planet. 

Though space dominance has long been a goal of American foreign policy, most crucially in the Cold War, Musk isn’t aiming for any kind of national leverage: he wants to leave Earth behind to make a new society centred on himself. It’s a “backup” plan for humanity, but it will be a colony of children born from his own genetic material.

Musk isn’t alone. Instead of countries vying for extraterrestrial supremacy, Musk’s foremost space rival is Bezos, who is set to launch a bizarre all-female rocket to space this spring with his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, and Katy Perry on board. Bezos hopes to industrialise space, moving the manufacturing concerns “that stress Earth” away from it. Both men have built huge company towns in Texas, where thousands of workers live to build their rockets.

Musk, meanwhile, wants to bio-engineer a new version of human that can survive in Mars’s burning temperatures, an idea close to the new cloning technology that props up Joon Ho’s movie world. For Joon Ho’s Musk-Trump composite character, Kenneth Marshall, the impulse to “purify” humanity can only be achieved by abandoning it, and any successful society requires masses willing to be exploited to get things done.

Like Marshall, who is quick to abandon his promises on Earth for better chances in space, it’s fair to question how invested space fanatics like Musk can be in making American society better, when he hopes to leave it as soon as he can. More likely, he views space as a stellar business opportunity, ripe with untapped resources and with no laws or regulations to get in your way. 

What Joon Ho shows us is how powerful figures normalise the exploitation of those who work for them to prop up their ambitions, something Musk is no stranger to. Tesla’s “giga-factories” have been accused of rampant sexual harassment and safety violations, and one lawsuit alleges a worker told his wife “I’m going to die in this factory”. Predictably, Musk thinks trade unions “create negativity in a company”. Bezos, our other keen space pioneer, uses algorithms to push his Amazon workers to breaking point; and those who work in his American factories are regularly, and seriously, injured. This kind of undervalued, exploited labour isn’t born from futuristic scientific experiments or any kind of dystopian future. It’s just ordinary people being walked all over today.

Yet the filmmaker is too nakedly partisan for his jabs at Musk-Trump to land. Indeed, the Trump-Musk amalgam can often serve as a distraction. The deeper, more productive critique embedded in the film has to do with the mistreatment of nameless multitudes, who damage their bodies and give up their lives so that those in higher social classes can enjoy themselves. We don’t need breakthroughs like cloning to normalise the extreme exploitation of workers, because there are Mickeys all around us.

Asked in a recent interview why even his Korean-language films are so popular all over the world, Joon Ho guessed it is because “except for one or two countries, everyone’s living under capitalism — it’s a universal language”. Storytelling in space can make the familiar feel alien. That’s the brilliance of Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror masterpiece, Alien, which harnesses fear out of the anxiety of pregnancy.

In its best moments, Mickey 17, does the same: by transposing exploitation into futuristic clones, the film indicts the present-day exploitation of our fellow human beings. It’s a worthy reminder that if we leave space — or Earth for that matter — in the unchecked hands of oligarchs, we might end up doing astonishing things, even as we export our worst human instincts: greed, selfishness, and the ability to turn a blind eye.