Mickey 17

Bong Joon-Ho's satirical sci-fi about a schlub who signs up to be killed and resurrected over and over again feels like something that got lost in translation.

I like science fiction and I like satire and I liked Bong Joon-Ho’s “Parasite,” though not nearly as much as those who showered it with Academy Awards a few years back.

I’m very much not replicating this sentiment for his first feature film since, “Mickey 17,” a satirical sci-fi flick adapted from Edward Ashton’s novel, “Mickey7.” I haven’t read it, but I get the sense the screenplay, also by Bong, diverges pretty sharply.

(Why they changed the book title, as it’s so much better, I dunno. Maybe they were hoping for some crossover appeal from “Stalag 17,” which was also a dour, wintry tale?)

Robert Pattinson, in a sharp departure from playing Batman, portrays the title character, Mickey Barnes, a dimwitted guy who gets in trouble with a loan shark in Earth’s dystopian future about 25 years from now and decides to make his escape by signing up for one of the colonizing spaceship expeditions taking people off-world.

Trouble is, a lot of human riff-raff have the same idea as things have gone badly bad economically and environmentally. So he signs up for the one surefire job no one else wants: expendable.

Mickey apparently didn’t read the fine print on his contract… or even the headline.

Expendables are the designed die-ers for each mission, one per ship, who are given the most dangerous and nasty jobs with a high chance of death. Sometimes the gleeful scientists don’t even wait for something bad to happen to Mickey, dreaming up new experiments and concoctions just to see what happens if, say, he’s exposed to massive radiation or an alien virus.

(They already know, of course, but want to record the specifics of each demise for science-y stuff, which seems little distinguished from their own amusement.)

As the title implies, as the story opens Mickey is on his 17th iteration in the four-plus years since they left Earth to establish a colony on Niflheim, a Hoth-like frozen planet. Not only is his body recreated each time he dies using a gizmo that “reprints” him, his memories are recorded and restored each time. From his perspective, it’s one continuous life stream in which he dies a horrible death over and over again, and wakes up over and over again.

The human printing machine is fueled by the organic waste from the crew, so he’s literally composed of sh*t — which is about how everyone treats him. He’s a novelty onboard, a meek, twitchy, squeaky-voiced guy who never stands up for himself, accepting the derision and his assigned deaths without complaint… though secretly he hates his lot.

The one redeeming part of his life is his ongoing romance with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a member of the police force, who takes a shine to Mickey for reasons that are a mystery to him, and to the audience. She acts as his protector and lover, even though sex is very much frowned upon because it expends so many calories and food is severely rationed.

The expedition is led by Kenneth Marshall, a blowhard failed politician who sees himself as the messianic savior of mankind, or at least this particular hunk of it. Played by Mark Ruffalo with massive teeth veneers and a flamboyant coiffure, the character is so over the top we wonder he doesn’t smack his head into the deckhead all the time.

Toni Collette plays his wife, Ylfa, who’s possibly even more deranged, obsessed with creating new sauces for their exorbitant table, in contrast to the pukey gray discs of food served to folks like Mickey.

During his latest misadventure, Mickey falls down an ice shaft and is presumed dead by the pilot, Timo (Steven Yeun), who is also Mickey’s friend from back on planetside, though we quickly grasp that any such relationship with Timo is very one-sided.

Anyway, Mickey is reported as being eaten up by the native inhabitants of the planet, which resemble giant woolly pillbugs. Marshall, demonstrating the limits of his intellect, dubs them “creepers.” But not only do they not munch on Mickey, they actually save him.

Upon returning to the ship, he finds he has already been reprinted by mistake. Not only that, Mickey 18 is an extroverted psychopath, for reasons never clearly explained since he is embedded with the same memories and personality. Mickey 17 is dismayed that Nasha has failed to recognize this drastic change and is already enthusiastically knocking boots with his… sequel, copy, descendant, I’m not sure what the right term is.

Things go on from there, with Marshall attempting to exert his dominance over the planet and the creepers, who turn out not to be just dumb bugs, all while filming everything with Leni Riefenstahl-like grandeur.

There’s the outline of a good movie somewhere inside all of this mess, but durn if I didn’t have trouble glimpsing it. The tone wavers from cartoonish to forbidding. The movie is way too long for the material (137 minutes) and there are too many side characters and subplots.

For example, Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei) enters the picture as a romantic contender for Mickey’s attention, trying to convince Nasha that since she’s got two Mickeys she should share the wealth. But Kai just sort of fades into the background from whence she came.

There are other, extraneous story shards: Marshall and Ylfa still being answerable to some kind of religious committee back on Earth; a threat that the loan shark’s agents are still chasing Mickey and Timo even into the farthest reaches of space; and a nerdy scientist (well, they all are) girl (Patsy Ferran) who seems to have slightly more humanistic urges than her colleagues.

The result is a movie that feels like it got translated into one language and then back again, and nothing really syncs up or lands right. It’s clearly going for comedy and wants to say something about our current societal faults, but the laughs are hard to find and the satire so arch it becomes weightless.

I remembered being surprised when Pattinson was announced as the new Batman. He seemed almost embarrassed about his star breakout in those “Twilight” movies, and like his co-star Kristen Stewart sought offbeat roles in small movies like “Good Time” and “The Lighthouse.”

Here he’s playing Mickey as the ultimate innocent, a literal sacrificial lamb and the one flickering candle flame of humanity’s good graces. But honestly he comes across as just a pathetic simp. Even though 18 is a titanic jerk, at least he does things and tries to change their lot.

“Mickey 17” is a movie with good intentions and a clumsy way of expressing them. It’s got some original ideas but doesn’t know what to do with them. At least you can say it’s not a carbon copy of other pictures.