I watched both Mickey‑17 and Superman (2025) because they’re Hugo nominees. I never would have watched Superman otherwise, and after this I’ll probably keep avoiding the franchise. Mickey‑17 at least felt like it had something interesting going on.
One of the things I appreciated about Mickey‑17 is how it handles identity in a way that lines up with what I’ve been thinking about since reading Old Man’s War and writing that earlier post about cyborgs and memory uploads. Old Man’s War raises the question of whether someone is still the same person after their body dies and their memories get transferred into a new one. The characters themselves start to wonder about it — and the story never really resolves it. Their world treats memory like a file you can copy into a new body and call it continuity, even though the cracks are obvious.
Mickey‑17 doesn’t gloss over those cracks. It leans into them. Mickey‑18 isn’t Mickey‑17. He’s similar, but he’s also more aggressive, more cynical, more fed up with the colony. He reacts differently because he is different. That’s the whole point: copying memories and experiences doesn’t preserve the person. It just preserves the data. The continuity of consciousness is gone.
What makes this even sharper is how the colony treats the Expendables. They’re commodities. They’re infrastructure. They’re bodies the system can use up because it has decided those bodies don’t count the same way other bodies do. It’s the same pattern I’ve noticed in other stories — Murderbot, Old Man’s War, The Handmaid’s Tale — where some people are treated as infinitely renewable resources and others are treated as irreplaceable. In Mickey‑17, the colony needs the fiction that each new Mickey is “the same person” to justify killing him over and over. But the moment Mickey‑17 and Mickey‑18 exist at the same time, the whole system collapses. You can’t pretend they’re interchangeable when they’re standing next to each other arguing.
Nasha is the only one who seems to understand that. She treats Mickey like a person, not a curiosity. Everyone else just wants to ask him what it feels like to die, as if his subjective experience is some kind of novelty item they get to poke at. Nasha is the one who recognizes his personhood, and that’s why she defends him the way she does. She sees the human being the colony refuses to acknowledge.
Even Mickey‑18, with all his sharper edges, still has a moral code. He’s not just “the angry version.” He’s a person with his own perspective, shaped by the gaps in his memories and the circumstances of his awakening. And he makes a choice that protects Mickey‑17 and Nasha, not because he’s programmed to do so, not because he’s a copy acting out a script, but because he recognizes their humanity. He’s not a defective version. He’s not a spare part. He’s a person making a decision.
That’s what made Mickey‑17 work for me. It actually takes its own premise seriously. It doesn’t pretend that memory equals identity. It doesn’t pretend that you can kill someone and reboot them and call it the same life. It doesn’t treat the philosophical questions like window dressing. It builds the story around them.
Then there’s Superman (2025), which I had to force myself to finish. I paused it, went to bed, and came back the next day because I felt obligated to get through it for the Hugos. I spent half the movie wondering how Lex Luthor convinced so many people to go along with his ridiculous plans — pocket universes, portals, “cities I care about,” whatever that was supposed to mean. And then I saw the endless credits list and thought: all these people worked on this, and this is the result.
There was one moment in Superman (2025) that actually worked for me, and it was Lois interviewing Clark as Superman. She’s the only person in the entire film who seems to understand that “I prevented a war” is not automatically a heroic statement. Her immediate pushback — basically, “Did you? Or did you just decide your assessment was the only one that mattered?” — was the only time the movie acknowledged that Superman acting unilaterally is not automatically noble.
It’s not like he was stopping a giant meteor from taking a chunk out of the Earth and throwing it off orbit. He was intervening in a geopolitical situation with actual governments, actual people, and actual consequences. Lois is the only one who raises the obvious question: who gave him the authority to decide what counts as “preventing” something? That scene had more moral clarity in thirty seconds than the rest of the movie had in two hours.
And honestly, that one exchange just made the rest of the film’s worldbuilding problems stand out even more. If the movie had followed that thread — the one where Superman’s unilateral actions have political, ethical, and human consequences — it might have had something to say. Instead, it went right back to portals, pocket universes, collapsing skyscrapers, and people cheering while their city falls apart.
The worldbuilding is a mess. If you’re going to make up fake countries and fake cities, why keep “United States” at all? And obviously Mexico exists because someone mentions a burrito. It’s inconsistent in a way that makes the whole setting feel flimsy. Metropolis is supposed to be a major American city, but Mr. Terrific and the newspaper editor are basically the only Black characters. It just adds to the sense that the world is a cardboard backdrop.
The destruction scenes are even worse. Entire skyscrapers collapse and people are somehow cheerful. A building ripped in half is a demolition site, not something you push back together like a broken toy. Mr. Terrific “closing the rift imperfectly” and Superman staring at mismatched cracks like it’s a minor cosmetic issue is absurd. That building is condemned. The whole city should be traumatized. Instead, the movie treats it like a quirky workplace disagreement.
The xenophobia subplot, trying to make Superman look bad for being an "alien," has no emotional weight. The movie doesn’t build a world where that fear makes sense. It doesn’t build a world at all. It just gestures at themes without doing any of the work.
By the end, Superman is apologizing to Mr. Terrific for pointing out that a cracked building isn't lined up, and I’m sitting there thinking: you should all be apologizing for the entire movie.
Mickey‑17 gave me characters who felt like people, not props. It took its own ideas seriously. It understood the same thing Old Man’s War hints at but never commits to: that identity isn’t something you can copy‑paste. Superman (2025) couldn’t even keep its own world consistent. One respected my time. The other made me hit pause and go to bed.
No comments:
Post a Comment