Our culture has long been fascinated by doppelgängers, clones, copies, and artificial stand-ins for the self. With the advancement of A.I., this fear seems to be even more heightened, with films and TV shows about replacements dominating pop culture. Older people are replaced with shinier versions of themselves (The Substance), art forms are threatened with obsoletion and new trends (A Complete Unknown, The Last Showgirl), and capitalism will use tech and any nefarious means necessary to create the perfect worker (Severance.) Under an increasingly isolated and capitalistic hellscape, this anxiety takes on an even darker twist. What happens when human lives become interchangeable, valued only for their function?

Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 pushes this question to its absurd extreme, creating a world where a person can die over and over again, only to be replaced by a near-identical version that picks up where the last one left off. Based on Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7, Bong’s sci-fi satire presents cloning as both a grim joke and a metaphor for labour exploitation, exploring what happens when survival means accepting your own expendability.

At the film’s centre is Robert Pattinson, playing Mickey, a down-on-his-luck drifter who inadvertently signs up to be an ‘Expendable’ on a mission to colonise the ice planet Niflheim. His job? To repeatedly die instead of his more valuable crew members. Each time he's resurrected through a grotesque process that prints out a new version of himself with his memories intact and body fresh, ready to be sacrificed again. Pattinson, ever willing to poke fun at himself, leans into Mickey’s pathetic, beaten-down persona, shifting between resignation and rebellion as he struggles with discovering that he’s not just replaceable - he’s designed to be disposed of.

Bong, known for his biting critiques of class and capitalism (Parasite, Snowpiercer), once again crafts a world where the logic of profit trumps morality. The ship’s leader, a smug and insecure corporate lackey (played with Trumpish zeal by Mark Ruffalo), preaches about the necessity of the Expendables while treating Mickey like a malfunctioning piece of equipment. The film is at its best when it leans into its satire, particularly during scenes that depict the casual cruelty of the mission: a conveyor belt of doomed Mickeys, a bureaucracy that treats human life as a resource to be extracted and recycled, an upstairs/downstairs exploration of wealthy leaders and exploited workers, and a corporate system so rigid that Mickey’s accidental survival creates a logistical nightmare.

While Mickey 17 offers a sharp premise and a visually inventive world, it doesn’t always follow through on its ideas. Bong inflates the number of Mickeys beyond the novel’s original seven, but the repetitiveness of the deaths and resurrections makes them lose their impact as the film progresses. The humour, though often effective, sometimes undercuts the story’s emotional stakes, reducing Mickey’s suffering to a series of increasingly elaborate punchlines.

The story, particularly in the second half, becomes increasingly convoluted, juggling corporate conspiracies, political power struggles and alien encounters that don’t always connect as smoothly as they should. The aliens Mickey encounters (dubbed ‘Creepers’) serve as a crucial plot point, yet they remain largely unexplored beyond their role as a metaphor for indigenous societies and colonisation. Even though Bong’s film is aiming for a lighter tone then a film like Arrival, it could have benefited from similar development of its creatures into fleshed out, sophisticated characters,

The supporting cast, while strong, sometimes feels underutilised. Naomi Ackie plays Nasha, a fellow crew member and Mickey’s love interest, who finds herself caught between multiple versions of the same man. Her relationship with Mickey becomes complicated when she suddenly has two of him, a scenario that offers intriguing ethical and emotional dilemmas, but the film doesn’t dig as deep into this dynamic as it could. Similarly, Toni Collette’s Ylfa, the commander’s manipulative wife, often veers into cartoonish territory, with her obsession with sauces become a very tired, one-note joke.

Subplots regarding a drug dealer, a judiciary council and the romantic threads are abandoned only to be hastily explained in the film’s final moments via a voice-over. The move feels clumsy and frankly more amateurish in its execution than audiences have come to expect from the director.

Still, Mickey 17 remains an entertaining and provocative ride. Bong’s world-building is as rich and strange as ever. He showcases an eye for striking imagery, turning the cold, industrial interiors of the spaceship into a claustrophobic nightmare, contrasting it with the icy, inhospitable landscape of Niflheim. The film’s visual effects, particularly in the cloning sequences, strike a balance between the clinical and the grotesque, emphasising just how dehumanising the process is. Pattinson’s performance keeps the film grounded in something human, even as Mickey’s humanity is called into question. In a system that treats workers as disposable, what does it mean to assert your right to exist?

While Mickey 17 may not reach the airtight precision of Parasite or the visceral impact of Snowpiercer, it remains an intriguing, darkly funny, and thought-provoking entry in Bong’s filmography. Its commentary on labour, identity, and the ethics of replacement may not always hit as hard as it could, but it still offers a vision of the future that feels disturbingly relevant. After all, in a world that constantly demands more work for less reward, who among us hasn’t felt like an Expendable?

• In cinemas now.