In ‘Mickey 17,’ Bong recycles Pattinson and his old ideas

Of course Bong Joon Ho is an environmentalist. He recycles his own ideas. “Mickey 17,” a sloppy but enjoyable sci-fi comedy set in the year 2054, mashes together the monsterphobia of “The Host,” the animal-rights activism of “Okja,” the environmental doomsaying of “Snowpiercer” and the social inequality of “Parasite,” that last one the Oscar winner that handed Bong the blank check to make a combo platter of his greatest hits. It’s the equivalent of the lunch tray that Mickey 17 (Robert Pattinson) gobbles up in his outer-space cafeteria: squares of the same nutritious gunk. But I’m not complaining. Some filmmakers deliver sermons; Bong serves entertainment.

The 17th Mickey is a flesh photocopy of Mickey Barnes, a good-for-nothing dope desperate to flee Earth after his macaron business flops and its main investor threatens him with a chainsaw. Earth isn’t worth sticking around for, anyway.

“Seems like the whole of this planet was running away from something,” Mickey says, gazing up at a long line of wannabe migrants jostling to earn a spot on an escape ship headed to the ice planet Niflheim. As frigid as it is, Niflheim doesn’t seem any worse than the pounding dust storms at home.

The trouble is, Mickey doesn’t have any skills. He’s underqualified to fly planes or lead science experiments or even dish the gunk. Mickey is a moron. A sweet moron, but a moron nonetheless, which is evident as soon as Pattinson starts squeaking banalities in a nasal gasp that sounds as though he’s never gotten enough oxygen to his brain. In Edward Ashton’s original 2022 novel “Mickey 7,” the character is an academic, a punch line that’s even more bleak.

So Mickey signs up to be the ship’s “expendable,” a canary-meets-crash-test-dummy who continually sacrifices his life in service of the fledgling colony. Someone has to sample the radiation in the atmosphere and the toxins in the air. Someone has to die to develop vaccines. He’s a human-on-demand 3D-reprint, made from scraps of garbage. Fittingly, Pattinson hunches his shoulders and curls his upper lip: an obedient lab rat.

The premise isn’t “Groundhog Day.” Mickey 17 remembers the pain of all prior Mickeys, from the original through No. 16. Among the indignities a newly vulnerable Mickey suffers, each one spurts out of a stuttering printer and flops to the floor, forsaken. With every copy, he’s treated less like a person. One of the smart tweaks Bong has made to Ashton’s book is devolving the character from an Everyman into a passive stooge. He’s hurting all over but can’t think straight about what is to blame.

In the opening scene, Mickey is trapped at the bottom of a chasm having plummeted not to his doom but to everyone else’s inconvenience. Cold and scared, he stares up at his supposed best friend, Timo (Steven Yeun), hoping for rescue. Timo sizes up his injuries with the impassivity of an insurance adjuster and abandons him to freeze.

“Have a nice death,” Timo says offhandedly. Mickey shivers. “Yeah, no ... we’re cool.”

The highfalutin parallel is to “Candide,” the classic 18th century novel about a naif who endures the horrors of civilization: chaos, selfishness, disease and destruction. The problems of 1759 are the same ones of 2054, with too many years in between. Bong’s probably read Voltaire. But his film plays to a poppier crowd. Mickey’s bowl haircut is straight out of “Dumb and Dumber.”

His obtuse optimism makes him the intergalactic Forrest Gump. Inconceivably, women love him. Mickey has an out-of-his-league girlfriend, Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who, when 17 takes too long to get back to her bedroom, proves a bit too eager for a replacement. The 18th Mickey, also played by Pattinson, is a more standard-issue hero who magically has a brain behind his eyes.

Pattinson has incredible physical control over both 17’s slack-jawed, knock-kneed cartoon and his identical opposite. (Nasha calls them “mild and habanero.”) As Pattinson toggles between the two, you can’t help but think back to how the former “Twilight” heartthrob shape-shifted himself out of playing romantic leads.

You can practically imagine Pattinson experimenting with his own face in front of a mirror, figuring out which tilt of the jaw transforms him from handsome (blah) to Neanderthal (hooray).

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