Mickey 17: Bong Joon Ho returns with 'Groundhog Day in space'

I understand the big buzz about Mickey 17. Director Bong Joon Ho made a gigantic splash with his last film, the quirky social satire Parasite.

Star of Mickey 17, Robert Pattinson, comes off the back of good performances in The Lighthouse, Tenet and The Batman.

And the rest of the cast – Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Naomi Ackie from last year’s Blink Twice – are no slouches either.

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And the film mines the currently trendy sci-fi genre, with plenty of Bong’s trademark comic flair. What’s not to like, asked the full house I saw Mickey 17 with?

Well, if all that’s true, then my own question is “Why did I find myself drifting off, more than once?”

I’m tempted to put the some of the blame on rather too-informative trailers for Mickey 17, which I’ll attempt to de-spoiler as much as I can.

We meet Mickey Barnes (Pattinson) at a low ebb on Earth in 2054.

With no prospects, and with bad guys on his trail, Mickey decides that space may be his final frontier. He volunteers for a job on a distant planet as an “expendable”.

Did he think he’d be hanging out with the grandchildren of Sylvester Stallone’s soldiers of fortune? Sorry, not that sort of expendable.

Instead, he’s a lowly worker who does all the risky jobs on the planet, with the extreme likelihood of ending up dead. But don’t worry. Science comes to his rescue.

Mickey simply gets reprinted – the same body, the same memories, the same clothes, and the same risky jobs. Welcome aboard, Mickey 2 - then Mickey 3, 4 and so on.

And each time an expendable comes back, he has to put up with the same dumb question. What’s it like to die? It’s wonderful, what do you think, sneers each successive Mickey.

Running the spaceship is failed politician turned middle manager Kenneth Marshall (Ruffalo essentially reprinting his angry bozo performance in Poor Things) – with his wife Ylfa (Collette as a sort of Kardashian Lady Macbeth).

The one ray of light for Mickey - now into his 17th iteration - is girlfriend Nasha, who tries to push him into aspiring to more than simply dying for a living.

But one day after another unhappy mission, something changes.

Rather than returning as a new Mickey, Mickey 17 finds himself in bed next to Mickey 18. They’ve become multiples.

And the rules on multiples are very strict. There can be but one. So which Mickey is the most expendable?

It’s a battle of wits for which most of the battlers are under-equipped.

The best thing about the film is how ingeniously director Bong and his team manage to work the two Mickeys on the screen – and also how Pattinson subtly differentiates between the nice but dim Mickey 17 and dim but psychotic Mickey 18.

But midway through I started to wonder whether I was quite as keen on playful sci-fi likeMickey 17 as I thought I was.

It’s a lot more obvious fun than, say, Dune 2, but in a way that makes it less engrossing somehow. Do I care about any of these expendable Mickeys?

And once your attention wavers in a busy, high-concept story like Mickey 17, it’s hard to regain it.

The audience I saw it with enjoyed it in a Groundhog Day in Space sort of way. But, as they said in that film, it’s fun. But by the end, it wasn’t my sort of fun.