Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17—his third English-language feature and his first film since the Best Picture-winning Parasite—is another genre-bending exercise laced with his peculiar brand of class-conscious commentary. In many ways, the silly sci-fi extravaganza unfolds as a quasi-greatest hits compilation of all the pet themes he’s cultivated, combining the frozen wasteland aesthetic of Snowpiercer and the cartoonish, allegorical critters of Okja.

Teetering between light farce and sweeping epic, the chaotic Mickey 17 is structurally messy, tonally jarring, and, at times, heavy-handed to a fault. Still, there’s no denying Joon-ho’s sprawling and immersive vision. While it may not be the most potent example of Joon-ho’s bold cinematic touch, it’s one of the most wildly entertaining.

Adding 10 Mickeys to Ashton Edward’s novel Mickey7, Joon-ho’s film takes place in an Earth ravaged by the 1%, where an interplanetary colonization effort is built upon the bodies of blue-collar schmucks (dubbed “expendables”) trapped in a cycle of life and death courtesy of a high-tech 3D printer that churns out another worker—complete with their previous memories—after the last iteration is violently expelled from its mortal coil. It’s a darkly comic vision of galactic late-stage capitalism, where even death is a raw commodity.

The eponymous Mickey Barnes is the 17th version of a desperate, down-trodden expendable who’s been killed in about every imaginable way on his journey to planet Nilfheim (conspicuously named after the Norse afterlife). Joon-ho cleverly uses this set-up, rendering each blood-curdling infection and garish maiming a vehicle for swift world-building and black comedy.

When Mickey unintentionally survives one of his suicide work details, he bumps into the hastily printed version 18. The former is meeker and docile, while the latter is more aggressive and assured, which leads to clashes over who gets to be with their fickle girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie), how they’re going to overthrow the budding colony’s egomaniacal leader (Mark Ruffalo), and how they’re going to hide the fact that they’re “multiples”—a crime where the capital punishment is the deletion of their base printer data.

From here, Mickey 17 abounds in thematic and narrative detours, fostering satire as bitingly prescient as it is on-the-nose. Moments that focus on the existential nature of Mickey’s dual being or the charming “creepers”—the planet’s native intelligent fauna—find the film full of great insights. Some  sequences that centre on the colony leader’s eugenic fantasies and supremacist ideologies are too broad-stroked and literal to leave an impact (a quality compounded by Ruffalo’s Western, imperialist caricature that draws directly on Donald Trump’s toothy tirades), but Mickey 17 is also full of earnest, earned emotion.

Pattinson’s twin-maximalist performance taps into two unique crooning registers, suggesting multiple, varying personas forced into being one, much like how the industrialist machine requires a denial of individuality to fuel it. In tandem with Darius Khondji’s textured, funnily observant cinematography, Mickey 17’s dystopic future serves as an awe-inspiring look at the dehumanizing present, where many such Mickeys are tossed into the thresher in the name of progress.

Mickey 17 is in theatres March 7