Morons from outer space: "Mickey 17"

For his first film post-Parasite, Bong Joon Ho has been tempted into going big. The kind of Warner Bros. budget that carries filmmakers to the outer reaches of the universe; Brad Pitt's Plan B shingle onboard as producers; A-lister Robert Pattinson cast in the lead role. Make that lead roles: Pattinson's Mickey is a downtrodden but - as it transpires - cloneable worker ant, recruited by our future overlords to carry out mid-21st century society's dirtier work, often perish in the process, but thereafter be born again in a human-scaled 3D printer. We know Bong has hit the biggish time because even the faces in throwaway minor roles, looming out from Fiona Crombie's overly oppressive production design, will be recognisable to British viewers: Tim Key! Thomas Turgoose! Holliday Grainger! Haydn Gwynne! (It's practically Wonka in space.) This isn't the first time Bong has worked with a predominantly English-speaking cast, as 2013's Weinstein-threatened Snowpiercer and 2017's Netflix-enabled Okja bear out. Mickey 17 is, however, the first time in Bong's filmography where, from a perilously early stage, an unresolved clash is apparent between the scale of the production and how those frames have been filled. One part of the new movie, the part a newly minted, freewheeling genre specialist might well have thought to pitch to a major American studio, intends to be a wacky, Buckaroo Banzai-style cult film in the making, pure bubblegum. Yet Bong's storytelling here is insistently leaden and heavyhanded - the bubblegum's got in his hair, between his usually dextrous fingers and under his feet - and there is more death and dismemberment than a large swathe of the cinemagoing public is going to find expressly funny. The studio's hesitation around the project, which has delayed Mickey 17's release until after this year's awards contenders had left the building, becomes understandable once you've sat in the same room as the film: the money's been spent on a visibly tough sell.

It helps nobody that the morbidity is frontloaded. In a half-hour prologue setting out the rules of this particular universe, we witness Mickey - or clones thereof - falling subject to radiation sickness, a deadly virus, and the whims of his employers. Coupled with the film's generally rundown vision of the future - Se7en cinematographer Darius Khondji coating this universe in dust, dirt and Stygian gloom - these early sequences are not unlike witnessing John Hurt's demise in Alien being played for Final Destination-like lolz. Even Mickey 17 - being the clone's seventeenth iteration - is introduced flat on his back, having tumbled into a cave populated by hungry-looking digital critters; stumbling back to base, somewhat the worse for wear but somehow still standing, he finds his replacement has been prematurely printed, and that unlike his milquetoast nerd self, Mickey 18 has emerged from the Hewlett-Packard as a ruthless sonofabitch. This development, at least, is a promising one: who wouldn't want to watch Pattinson vs. Pattinson, two twitchy weirdoes for the price of one ticket, especially once the Mickeys enter into an intergalactic throuple with comely crewmate Naomi Ackie? But Bong gets distracted by far less interesting deviations: a straggly subplot about a frenemy (Steven Yeun), seizing upon mankind's ascent as an opportunity to expand his opioids marketshare, and the presence of a populist politician who, likewise, is exploiting this upward mobility to push for greater racial purity. No prizes for guessing which prominent public figure Mark Ruffalo, a once-capable actor seemingly ruined by sustained contact with Yorgos Lanthimos and the MCU, has based his performance on; all I can say is that watching a shitty Trump impersonation proves almost as deadening as watching the real thing. To unappealing sci-fi, Bong adds the flatulent satire of a dystopian future that's already here.

Over two hours twenty - that most cursed of running times - the problems mount. It's not just that you can see why WB were nervous; you're led to conclude they were right to be worried. Mickey 17 is too busy worldbuilding to tell a coherent story, and the world it's building is odorous, cluttered-to-clogged and at every other turn resistible. One looks in vain for the sure hand that set the intricately loaded mantrap of Parasite. The framing's nondescript, yielding not a single memorable setpiece; the colours nonexistent. (No need for a black-and-white version when Khondji's muffling everything in shades of drab.) And there are clear signs of postproduction panic: awkward daubs of voiceover, obvious last-reel patch-ins attempting to counteract presumably disastrous test scores, or simply tie some of these loose ends together. The actors have mostly been left to their own devices. Yes, Ruffalo's terrible, but it may be more telling that the usually reliable Ackie seems wobbly and underdirected, and I'm growing worried - after Cosmopolis and The Lighthouse and High Life and maybe even Good Time, which I wasn't wild about - that Pattinson has grown addicted to wayward auteurism, to supporting projects that, under the usual movie circumstances, wouldn't have seen the light of day for sound reasons. The precision's gone: all Bong can put on screen here are wearyingly empty gestures, untethered effects (note how those critters signify 0.00001% of what Okja did) and endless scenes of shouting into the wind. I went into Mickey 17 expecting a romp or at least an interesting misfire, something to make me side with the artist over the studio; instead, I suffered through a stiff that makes Demolition Man look like Lubitsch; and I emerged from this dud wondering how we start the paperwork to get an Oscar taken back. The dysfunction of the American system was once confined to throwing good money after bad movies; with Mickey 17, it turns an inspired director into a hack. We'll be unlucky if we witness a bigger disappointment in 2025 - but the way things are going, who knows?

Mickey 17 is now playing in cinemas nationwide.