Bong Joon Ho's English-language follow-up to the critically-acclaimed Parasite is certainly a curious sci-fi headscratcher, with Robert Pattinson playing an Expendable, a lowly employee on a deep-space mission to find a habitable plant who undertakes lethal tasks and is simply replaced ('reprinted') with memories intact every time he dies. The film is full of visual/conceptual and serious/wacky ideas that keeps the film consistently interesting over its indulgent running time. It is part strange love story, part hard sci-fi, part political/colonisation satire and part goofball comedy, which is a somewhat peculiar mix that makes it hard to define its audience. The first act is the most successful, a self-contained circular narrative that tells the story of Mickeys 1-17, but when 17 goes missing presumed dead on a hostile planet, his unexpected return and encounter with the newly-printed Mickey 18 leads to all manner of complications, and the movie becomes more melodramatic and wayward. Pattinson makes the oddball protagonist (the focal 17th iteration) surprisingly engaging and likeable, and he handles the multiple versions - at times sharing the same screen - very effectively, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo go full panto mode as the morally-corrupt expedition leaders, Naomi Ackie gives sterling support throughout, and the director brings a familiar gentle classiness to the proceedings (regardless of the actual style of a particular scene). This is basically a meditation on life, death, power and identity which is at its heart quite simplistic and blunt, wrapped up in large-scale sci-fi trappings, and whilst its ambition is evident, the different strands and themes get somewhat lost or underdeveloped amidst the tonal unevenness in this undoubtedly interesting but not wholly satisfying movie.
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