Mickey 17 is Bong Joon-ho's wildly inventive science-fiction black comedy, adapted from Edward Ashton's novel Mickey7, and it finds the South Korean auteur working on a canvas of pure genre spectacle while keeping his needle-sharp eye fixed on class, exploitation, and what it means to be expendable. Robert Pattinson plays Mickey Barnes, a man so desperate to escape debt that he signs up to be an "expendable" — a human guinea pig on an interstellar colonization mission who can be cloned and reprinted whenever he dies, carrying all his memories into each new body. The catch is that there should only ever be one Mickey at a time, so when Mickey 17 survives a seemingly fatal fall and returns to the ship to find Mickey 18 already printed and living his life, the situation quickly escalates into something the mission's ruthless commander (Mark Ruffalo, magnificently unhinged) considers a grave liability.

Bong Joon-ho orchestrates the film's tonal shifts with the precision of a conductor moving between movements — tender one moment, brutally comic the next, laced throughout with a fury at systems that treat human beings as renewable resources. Pattinson commits entirely to the dual performance, finding two distinct personalities within the same face and body. Naomi Ackie is sharp and funny as Mickey's girlfriend Nasha, and Toni Collette delivers a cameo of gleeful absurdity as the commander's equally power-drunk spouse. The film's alien world is rendered with a lushness and practical texture that makes the CGI feel earned rather than lazy.

Mickey 17 is Bong Joon-ho at his most playful and his most angry simultaneously, a film that wears its science fiction trappings lightly while delivering a scalding commentary on corporate expendability, human commodification, and the casual cruelty of those at the top of a hierarchy looking down at the people they consider easily replaceable. It is one of the most original blockbusters in years, and it streams on Max.