The Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho has delivered his first movie since the Oscar-winning Parasite six years ago, and it’s a great, big, slightly soft-edged, sci-fi fantasy. Adapted by Bong from Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7, it stars Robert Pattinson as a bio-clone menial worker of the future condemned to eternal life, or eternal death, by being repeatedly killed in the service of a space exploration corporation doing fatally dangerous jobs and then reincarnated.
It’s a broad-brush futurist satire on the theme of Elon Musk-type tech bros who say that whining about the environment is for libtards because we’re all shooting off for space really soon, where there have to be viable planets somewhere, and any current alien inhabitants are expendable – as indeed are the working humans who are getting us out to new worlds.
