I saw Mickey 17 this past weekend, the latest movie by Bong Joon Ho (Parasite), a sci-fi action black comedy which raises issues about personal identity, among (many) other things.
[archived image unavailable]
The movie is set in the future during an expedition to, and arrival at, a planet several light years away. Humans have figured out how to recreate persons in a manner not unlike Derek Parfit’s teletransporter, and they print out a new copy of the ship’s “expendable”, Mickey, each time he dies doing something too dangerous to have others do.
Fairly early on in the movie, we get something like what Parfit calls a “branch-line case,” and there are two Mickeys running around. The film does a good, if brief, job capturing how intuitions about personal identity and teletransportation-like technology may change when confronted with the possibility of multiple copies of a person.
About this possibility, Parfit asks, “how could a double success be a failure?” and for a while the movie could be seen as providing an answer to that question (albeit with a different sense of “failure”).
The ethics of person-printing are touched on, slightly, in some narrative flashbacks, but overall, the film doesn’t spend much time exploring the philosophical issues of its most distinctive technology.
In part that’s because there’s way too much going on. I recall an old review of Reasons and Persons in which the author (I forgot who) said it would have been better had it instead been three or four separate books. I doubt that’s true of Parfit’s book, but I do think Mickey 17 has enough themes and plot threads for what should have been several movies. There isn’t a lot of depth or development or subtlety in this movie, unfortunately. Is it at least fun, then? Alas, not really. It was mostly unpleasant. So I’m reluctant to recommend it. (Perhaps viewers who really go in for really dark humor and have a tolerance for over-the-top caricature will have a different view.)
But if this movie has whetted your appetite for a clever story to watch about personal identity, teletransportation, and moral responsibility, below is a short animated film with the ungoogleable title, To Be, made by John Weldon and released by the National Film Board of Canada in 1990. It’s quite good. Enjoy!
Watch archived video on YouTube
(Note: I’ve found the closed-captioning / subtitles are not quite right; you may want to turn them off if you don’t need them.)
