What Are The Creepers? Mickey 17’s Sci-Fi Creatures Explained

This post contains some spoilers for “Mickey 17.”

In Bong Joon Ho’s new sci-fi film “Mickey 17,” Robert Pattinson played the titular Mickey, a low-paid grunt on a distant spaceship. As the previews have made explicit, Mickey is an “Expendable,” that is: when he dies, he can easily be cloned — or “printed” — and replaced within a day. Needless to say, Mickey is selected for the ship’s most dangerous missions. By the time audiences catch up with him, he’s on his 17th printing.

Mickey lives on a ship of conservative cultists who worship a Trump-like televangelist named Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo). Marshall is so hated on Earth that he left on a long-distance spacecraft to find an interplanetary haven he plans on calling Niflheim. Throughout “Mickey 17,” he and his horrid wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) talk about how they’re seeking a genetically pure stock, making it abundantly clear that they’re Evangelical eugenicists. They’re pretty rotten people, and were clearly written as a broad-but-not-really-that-broad metaphor for the modern American Right Wing. 

When the ship lands on a potential Niflheim planet — a world of frozen tundra — Mickey finds that it is populated only by a species outsize arctic pillbugs. The bugs are creepy to Marshall, so he nicknamed them Creepers. He’s happy to eradicate the Creepers if it means he can colonize Niflheim. 

While out on a mission, Mickey falls down a crevasse and encounters a nest of Creepers, terrified by their many legs and growling noises. But, perhaps unexpectedly, the Creepers do not eat Mickey (something he takes personally; does he taste bad?), and rescue him by depositing him back onto the surface. Curious. As the film progresses, Mickey realizes that the Creepers are intelligent. Indeed, they have a language, names, families, and a culture all their own. 

A story of self-obsessed Christians traveling to a distant world, occupied by “creepy” natives they aim to eradicate. The Creepers are a clear sci-fi metaphor for the victims of European and American colonialism. 

Without giving too much away, audiences do eventually learn the depths of the Creepers’ intelligence. They are capable of communicating, and even seem to have a sense of humor. Kenneth Marshall, a d-bag with backward ideas of eugenics, sees them as nothing more than vermin to be killed in order to make room for his “glorious” new colony of white, pseudo-Christians. The Creepers, one can see, can stand in for any people who have been attacked, eradicated, or pilloried by any number of oppressive colonialists throughout human history. They are the “savages” who need to be “tamed.” Bong Joon Ho is hardly being subtle about it. 

Because “Mickey 17” was made by an American studio, it’s easy to see the Creepers as a metaphor for this continent’s First Nation people, and Marshall as a stand-in for the encroaching American colonies. Marshall is constantly being told that what he’s doing is noble, mythic, grandiose. Mickey sees it for what it is: meaningless slaughter, based only on Marshall’s disgust with their physical appearance. 

Using aliens as a metaphor for oppressed people is nothing new, of course. There are numerous films and TV shows that have cast humans as oppressive colonizers and extraterrestrials as their targeted “inferiors.” That was the premise of Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 flick “District 9,” a cleverly made film that saw bug-like aliens forced to live in a dump-like ghetto district by the nearby humans. That same year, one could see James Cameron’s “Avatar,” the ultra-blockbuster about the Na’Vi, a gentle, low-tech, tribal species of blue giants that faced military eradication at the hands of violence-obsessed, high-tech human visitors. 

Closest to “Mickey 17” may be Paul Verhoeven’s 1998 film “Starship Troopers,” a film about how a futuristic fascist human regime has waged war on giant intelligent extraterrestrial insects … for no reason we can tell. 

Faceless and/or monstrous aliens are also often used in sci-fi stories as a challenge to our humanity. In the 2013 film version of “Ender’s Game,” for instance, kids are trained in military tactics, intended for use in war against an off-screen species called Formics. That film ends with a shocking twist that reveals how far humanity had fallen in terms of its willingness to commit wartime violence. It ultimately argues for compassion, and pleads with people to understand all people, rather than using their “otherness” as an excuse to kill them. The author of the original “Ender’s Game” novel should sit down and read “Ender’s Game” someday. 

Sometimes the metaphor gets a little hazy, however. James Cameron clearly wanted audiences to sympathize with the Na’vi in “Avatar,” but we have less sympathy for the xenomorphs in his 1986 film “Aliens.” That film was about human colonialist marines who are sent into dangerous territory to exterminate the creatures who have come to infest the place. They are outmatched, however, and they all die. Cameron has seen his film as a metaphor for the Vietnam War, although it’s certainly not flattering to compare the Viet Cong to slathering, cockroach-like monsters. In “Aliens,” the meaning of the film falls apart under scrutiny. 

When watching the Creepers in “Mickey 17,” a Trekkie might also instantly think of the Horta, the abalone-like aliens from the episode “The Devil in the Dark” (March 9, 1967). Both the Creepers and the Horta scurry along the ground and have a shelled-insect-like appearance. Also, both are initially seen as animals, easy to exterminate as vermin by human interlopers. In both cases, the aliens emerge as not only intelligent and capable of communication, but motivated by a strong sense of familial preservation. It’s a great episode, that only lacks female characters. 

So “Mickey 17” joins some prestigious company with its Creepers. They aren’t just “creepy aliens.” They are part of a cinematic tradition.