"Hey Mickey, what’s it feel like to die?”

The title character of "Mickey 17," Bong Joon-ho’s silly-serious sci-fi satire, his follow-up to 2019’s Oscar-winning megahit "Parasite," gets this a lot. He’s an expendable, a person so desperate for work he’s agreed to be endlessly "reprinted” and endlessly killed doing super-risky jobs. When Timo (Steven Yeun) asks this question, Mickey (Robert Pattinson) is lying on his back at the bottom of an ice pit. Looking up at his best friend, who’s dangling a rope that’s just too short to reach him, Mickey sighs and furrows his brow. There’s no time for metaphysics; a gruesome, hungry-looking alien has just turned up.

Bong has described "Snowpiercer" (2013) as his "hallway” movie: While the rich live it up at the front of the apocalyptic film’s speeding train, the poor try desperately to escape the squalid caboose. "Parasite" is his "stairway” movie: The wealthy loll about in a modernist temple on top of Seoul’s highest hill, while the have-nots, trapped in a filthy basement apartment in the valley below, scheme their way to the top. Let’s call "Mickey 17" the director’s "trash chute” movie, serving up an even more brutal metaphor for societal inequality. Over and over, his hero kicks the bucket and gets thrown into a molten furnace of organic goo, only to be spit out anew for another go at torture and humiliation.