Shaggy, thrice-rescheduled Mickey 17, writer-director Bong Joon Ho’s first movie since 2019’s contemporaneous black comedy Parasite, continues in the kooky science-fiction tradition of Okja (2017) and the similarly ice-stiff Snowpiercer (2013). Based on Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, which I haven’t read, it’s set nearly 30 years in the future and follows a debt-drowned young man, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson, pitching his voice up into a vaguely southern whine), who works an ethically questionable job so controversial it’s been outlawed on Earth. Entirely space-bound Barnes makes meager money as an “expendable,” a role necessitating its doer complete likely-to-be-lethal assignments — suck in virus-infected air to assist with vaccine research, wander a distant planet’s slick caves to see if anything dangerous lives within — and then, once they’re killed, have their memories inserted into a perfect clone 3D-printed with the ease of a college essay. 

Barnes is the sole expendable on a ship whose inhabitants — which also includes a domination-minded American politician, Kenneth Marshall (a veneered and spray-tanned Mark Ruffalo), with idolatrous followers that wear red hats — plan to colonize a wintry planet called Niflheim. Niflheim’s hostile climate is, to Marshall’s eye, the least of the vessel’s problems. More troublesome are the Marshall-termed “creepers,” giant, tentacled creatures native to the planet that one character says look like “croissants dipped in s—.” It will materialize that these intelligent animals are completely harmless, but Marshall thinks it’s wisest to exterminate an entire species with not-immediately-clear intentions mostly because they’re big and scary. (Ruffalo’s clobbering performance is the movie’s weakest link: it’s like he’s playing Mike Myers playing a certain political leader.)

Read the full review at 425.