‘It Can Look a Bit Like an MRI’

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “Mickey 17,” currently playing in theaters.

In the near-future space travels of the Bong Joon Ho film, “Mickey 17,” Robert Pattinson plays an Expendable – a person designated to be used for often-fatal scientific experiments and revived through a human printer that makes an exact copy of their body, memories intact, each time.

Production designer Fiona Crombie said that to come up with the printer’s visual look, she looked at medical equipment and “high-tech weaving machines.” Although the printer is the “most advanced” part of the spaceship, the goal with the overall “Mickey 17” aesthetic was to ensure that the futuristic nature of the setting was balanced by the use of existing references.

“It is based in a reality, like we’re looking around us and seeing, ‘What is a real-world version of this that we can extrapolate and push and take further?’” Crombie said. “There’s lots of things we recognize, and then you have a few key elements that we don’t know.”

The human printer is one such example that draws from real materials while also providing an inventive look at how a machine could theoretically reconstruct a person. Crombie spoke with Variety to break down her approach to the printer as well as clues in the machine’s design that indicate how exactly it’s creating Pattinson’s character, Mickey, each time.

The artisans dubbed the machine’s outer color “IBM beige” because it’s supposed to be “like that old kind of computer,” Crombie said. Its circular shape came from the idea that “there’s a good tension between the formality of a circle and the unwieldy shapes of the ship.” She added, “There was something interesting for us about the idea that you could almost never walk in a straight line in that spaceship. You’re always going up or down or under, around if the ship is always built around an engine or a machine that’s running it, and the humans are living around it.”

The printing process starts with matter from the cycler feeding into the human printer to provide the biological material needed to produce Mickey. A mass of entrail-like cords attached to the back of the machine signifies this movement of waste. “I did think there was something fascinating about watching amazing, thick rope being intertwined, like that kind of plastic rope you get, where this kind of stitching comes together, and all of these needles are doing this incredible pattern to create a volume,” Crombie said.

“It can look a bit like an MRI,” Crombie added. “But then coming off that is this organic sort of movement.”

According to Crombie, the ring around the printer contained syringe-like tubes that then carry the organic matter from the cycler “after it’s been processed” and the matter is then “finely woven into the body.”

As the artisans worked on the design, they discussed the machine possibly focusing and adjusting like a camera lens. “Say you’re printing, it’s focusing on an organ or something, it would kind of shift and move to that particular area and then shift,” Crombie said.

The idea of that type of “layered movement” was important for Crombie to think of the machine as something that’s practical and still prone to error. “It’s not super tidy, maybe it can have a little glitch.”

Crombie compared it to an actual printer in the way that the body slides haltingly out of the cylindrical drum. “It has the capacity for a paper jam like our bodies, suddenly they’re spat out too quickly, or they might have to go back.”

What the inside of the human printer looks like remains a mystery for most of the film until a nightmare sequence at the very end when Ylfa (Toni Collette) is watching Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) being printed. Ylfa looks through a clear panel (the only time that part of the machine is shown), and viewers catch an unfinished body mid-formation. “You’re seeing it almost like one end is complete, and then it hasn’t been built from then on,” Crombie said.

The graphics team added a touchscreen on the side of the machine to allow the technician characters to facilitate or monitor the printing process.

Similar to how ropes push materials into the back of the human printer, wires fastened to a cap on Mickey’s head transmit memory data. “We did look at brain scanning and when people have lots of tubes coming out of skull caps,” Crombie said.

In the film, Mickey’s memories are contained in a device shaped like a brick and pushed down into another mechanism. “Director Bong really wanted to see it click in. We talked about it being like a phone, a battery or something, or actually like walkie-talkies on set when you’re charging them,” Crombie said.

In order to make the “absurd” and “playful” brick seem like an actual device, Crombie’s team added sensors to the mechanism. The brick’s handle is transparent because Bong “liked to have things that were visible but invisible.”

Crombie emphasized that in designing the human printer, the artisans were not too concerned about having meticulous scientific explanations behind each visual aspect. “We also wanted to leave it a mystery because really it’s up to the viewer. I mean, I love the idea that people are kind of putting it together themselves because it’s fiction.”

“Mickey 17,” in general, is not fixated on explaining the technicalities of the space mission. According to Crombie, Bong was uninterested in the logic of gravity and who was flying the ship. “This is a sci-fi that has cables, where people make mistakes, and they’re just humans,” she said. Like any technology, the human printer relies on the people who operate it. A technician can trip over a wire, as Crombie remembers reading in the script, or forget to check in on Mickey. “Oh, we can see how things are plugged in, and they pop out, or it doesn’t quite work,” Crombie noted.

It’s not just the human printer that had a circular shape. Crombie maintained that motif throughout, specifically in the form of the cycler and the desk in the convention center where Mickey signs up to be an Expendable.