There was something wearyingly predictable about the fact that, after many years of making excellent genre-adjacent movies (The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, the Batman trilogy), what actually won Christopher Nolan an Oscar was a primarily realist historical drama. That's how much the academy dislikes SF, fantasy, and horror, unfortunately – they're quite willing to hang on until you make an 'acceptable' film before giving you a prize.

I didn't realise it at the time but the same thing was true a few years earlier when Bong Joon Ho's Parasite got the nod – I mean, once again, a deserving recipient, but isn't it interesting that the award went to a realist drama rather than Snowpiercer, Okja or The Host? Oh well – one of the other things that history teaches us is that winning an Oscar never makes it more difficult to make the films you want, which is why it should be no surprise that his follow-up is a return to the kind of quirky, dystopian SF he's been doing for years now.

This is Mickey 17, based on a novel by Edward Ashton. You might think that it's been five years since Parasite so what's Bong been doing, honestly, sitting around polishing his gongs? The answer is that this is another film that was originally due to come out a year ago but got held up due to the Hollywood strikes: nevertheless there is a startling moment when the actress Haydn Gwynne, whom I had thought died years and years ago, makes a posthumous cameo.

Other notions of limited immortality inform the premise of the film. It is the mid-21st century and climate collapse is driving a sustained effort to colonise other planets, with bold and ambitious would-be settlers signing up in droves. Along with Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), who is motivated more by his desire to not be carved into pieces by an impatient loan shark. Lacking any useful skills or other valuable attributes for the mission, Mickey volunteers to become what is known as an expendable, a unique position – a detailed record of his physiology and memory is made, with the result that every time he dies, a replacement Mickey can rapidly be 3D-printed and put back into service.

It's not a terribly new idea – I've reached the point of plotting out at least three stories based on the same premise myself – but the script does a good job of finessing the finer points of the concept to keep it plausible and straightforward enough to work in a mainstream movie. Various comic-horrible deaths then afflict the first few Mickey-replicants, although what would surely be a rather hellish existence has the edge taken off it by a not entirely convincing romance with one of the mission's security guards (Naomi Ackie).

Eventually the ship reaches its destination, the icy planet Niflheim, which seems to be exclusively occupied by giant shaggy woodlice. This is not going to deter the expedition's commander, Kenneth Marshall, an egotistical and not especially bright politician (the film takes pains to stress how Marshall lost several elections on Earth). This gives Mark Ruffalo, who plays Marshall, the chance to give a very big performance, which the film's publicists have stressed is absolutely not based on any particular real-world individual – and if you find this believable, I happen to have the deeds to a number of large and historic bridges which I would be happy to sell you.

Inevitably there is a cock-up resulting in two versions of Pattinson – Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 – being in existence at the same time, which is absolutely forbidden, probably for sound plot reasons. (Although the issue of why the different Mickeys have substantially different personalities is skipped gracefully over, mostly.) Can the various Mickeys help bring about peaceful coexistence on Niflheim between the colonists and the woodlice, and derail the despotic ambitions of Marshall?

You don't often get adverts for veganism playing in front of movies, especially at this time of year, so I doubt that the one in front of Mickey 17 is there by accident. It's certainly a good fit for the movie, which is impeccably humanist and contains some up-front messaging about the ill-treatment of small cute animals. No-one could seriously accuse the movie of not having its heart the right place – possibly on its sleeve.

Which is, you know, all very well, but the film has been heavily advertised on the strength of the idea of the multiple Robert Pattinsons, and I was interested to see what a clever and imaginative director like Bong Joon Ho would do with the slew of questions about memory, identity and personality that open up when you start dealing with true human duplication.

The problem is that the script works hard to build up to the moment when the two iterations of Pattinson come face to face, but almost immediately afterwards it seems to lose interest in its own premise. Both versions of Pattinson get a lot of screen time, obviously, and it's a clever brace of performances, but the film really becomes much more about the colonists giving the woodlice an unwarranted raw deal and Mark Ruffalo giving us his Donald Trump impersonation.

Now, if somebody wants to stick it to the Great Orange Emperor then fine, I'll happily hold their coat for them, but I felt like this was getting in the way of a more interesting, thoughtful, nuanced film that was genuine SF rather than grotesque, slightly bonkers satire. I mean, the film is fun and pleasing to the eye (Bong is too good a director for this not to be the case), and certainly very watchable, but the whole replication angle feels very secondary to the second half of the plot.

And even the satire is awkward, considering that the film has sat on the shelf for a year. Marshall is a failed politician, the film takes pains to point out – the only reason he and his cult-like followers are all going off to outer space is because he can't win an election on Earth. There's a kind of complacent smugness here on the part of the script which actual events have perhaps shown to be unjustified, and it doesn't leave a good taste in the mouth.

Still, it's a fun performance from Ruffalo, and Toni Collette is equally good as his unhinged spouse – though who, if anyone, this character is based on is obscure. It is a well-acted and impressively-assembled movie, with some interesting monsters, too – and even if the black comedy gets a bit obvious or laboured, there's always something interesting going on.

Still, it wasn't really the movie I was hoping for, having less focus and less willingness to explore its own ideas – but it is a proper SF comedy film, and a confidently made one too. This is probably one of those times when it is best just to accept the positives one can find, but I don't think it's unreasonable to hope that any future English-language projects from Bong are a little bit less knockabout.

Awix

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