Bong Joon Ho's 'Mickey 17' is a kooky sci-fi allegory

There’s a special kind of self-indulgence that filmmakers are sometimes granted after a massive success, a blank check opportunity that comes maybe once in a career if you’re lucky, and isn’t always spent wisely. Writer-director Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” was the surprise sensation of 2019, a caustic, tightly-wound thriller about capitalism and its discontents that went home with four Academy Awards, including Best Picture — an honor unheard of for a foreign language film. Being a big Bong fan from way back when I wandered into an early Brattle Theatre screening of his wildly satirical 2006 Godzilla homage “The Host,” the mainstream embrace of “Parasite” was enormously gratifying, though I couldn’t help noting at the time that the film’s precision and Hitchcockian control made it something of an outlier in his filmography.

Most Bong Joon Ho movies are more like “Mickey 17,” a kooky and digressive new sci-fi allegory stew that finds the filmmaker indulging his pet preoccupations and some of his silliest whims while burning through a reported $150 million of Warner Bros. Discovery’s money. I have a soft spot for films like this, when auteurs are allowed to run amok with studio resources. Bong is being aided and abetted this time by Warner’s latest Batman, Robert Pattinson, who, like his old “Twilight” co-star Kristen Stewart, has commendably parlayed his franchise cachet into securing funding for more oddball, outré efforts. (I still cherish the memories of seeing David Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis” and Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse” in auditoriums full of aghast Twi-hard fans. Team Edward.)

The last time Pattinson went to outer space, he was being poked and prodded and having his semen stolen in director Claire Denis’ haunting 2018 “High Life,” and “Mickey 17” continues the interstellar bodily mortification of Robert Pattinson by internationally acclaimed auteurs. He stars here as Mickey Barnes, a hapless doofus fleeing chainsaw-wielding debt collectors by taking a job as an “expendable” at a new off-world colony without reading the fine print on the application. Mickey has surrendered his bodily autonomy to a cloning program that’s been banned on Earth but remains deregulated in deep space, thus allowing the colony to use him as a lab rat and a guinea pig before printing off a new version of him every time Mickey meets his unfortunate demise. He dies a lot.

Sixteen times, to be exact, often to grossly comedic ends. The picture begins with Mickey number 17 taking a nasty tumble and being left for dead during an ill-fated expedition on the colony’s ugly, inhospitable ice planet. His callous childhood friend (a very funny Steven Yeun) abandons him in a crevasse, as there’s not much point in bothering with a rescue attempt if you can just run off another Mickey when you get home. It’s a typical Bong scenario, sending up a capitalist system that literally grinds up its workers into recyclable paste. (My favorite of his films, 2013’s “Snowpiercer,” crammed the last survivors of a climate apocalypse onto a speeding train going around in circles, the people locked in cars according to class and caste, forever trying to fight their way to more humane accommodations in the front. A subtle filmmaker, he is not.)

Complications arise when Mickey 17 unexpectedly survives, coming home to find that Mickey 18 has already taken over his job (and his girlfriend) on a planet where “multiples” are expressly forbidden. This new Mickey is also kind of a jerk, giving Pattinson the opportunity to deliver two very different turns. He’s such a playful actor, imbuing the sweetly naive 17 with an “aw shucks” sincerity and an American accent that sounds like a bookie in a 1930s musical. Number 18 is made of sterner stuff, peeved at his predecessor for signing up for this stupid gig in the first place. Meanwhile, Mickey’s girlfriend (Naomi Ackie) is rather delighted by the erotic possibilities of having two boyfriends, nicknaming them “Mild Mickey” and “Habanero Mickey.”

There’s a farcical aspect to keeping these dueling Mickeys a secret from the authorities, one that‘s sidelined by a brewing conflict with the planet’s indigenous inhabitants — cute, pasta-shell-looking bugs dubbed “creepers” by the colony’s gasbag martinet. A disgraced political candidate and dimbulb demagogue played with venomous brio by Mark Ruffalo, the colony’s fearless leader and junk scientist is like a combination of Donald Trump and Elon Musk without the refined social graces. Ruffalo juts his top teeth out and plays the character as a whiny, insecure boor constantly angling for the adoration of an audience, any audience. (He’s the only dictator who hosts his own late night talk show.) It’s an amusingly unhinged performance and a little of it goes a very long way.

Flinging around familiar critiques of fascism, animal cruelty and the avarice that drives men to despicable deeds, “Mickey 17” sometimes feels like a greatest hits medley of Bong’s favorite tropes, albeit a little heavier than usual on the wacky, face-pulling comedy. It’s probably closest in tone to “Okja,” the 2017 factory farming expose he made for Netflix, though I’m relieved to report there’s nothing here nearly as abrasive as that movie’s infamous Jake Gyllenhaal performance. Bong’s reckless, everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink abandon can be trying from a plot perspective, as it’s tough to tell the non sequiturs from discarded story threads. Some characters, like a romantic rival played by Anamaria Vartolomei from France’s recent, rip-roaring “The Count of Monte Cristo” adaptation, simply disappear.

“Mickey 17” was originally set for release at this time last year, with post-production delays attributed to the SAG-AFTRA strike, an excuse that doesn’t hold a lot of water when you think about it. It’s clearly a movie that’s been fussed over in the editing room, with abrupt scene transitions and an overly explanatory narration that often reiterates something we’re seeing onscreen. Bong’s legendary battles with producer Harvey Weinstein over the final cut of “Snowpiercer” became so pitched that the latter basically sabotaged the movie’s theatrical release out of spite. (It wasn’t going to play at all around here until the Brattle swooped in to the rescue.) I wouldn’t be surprised to see stories emerge in the weeks ahead about similar scuffles with Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav, the most cretinous and thin-skinned of modern Hollywood executives.

Yet even if “Mickey 17” feels compromised in the cutting, there’s still something exhilarating about watching an artist like Bong being allowed to get this goofy on such a huge studio canvas. Lumpy and misshapen as it may be, this is an endearingly strange film, an angry allegory with an underlying sweetness and faith in humanity’s fundamental goodness, despite all visible evidence to the contrary.

“Mickey 17” opens in theaters on Thursday, March 5.