Oscar winner Bong Joon Ho’s latest film is an arch sci-fi parable about the troubled world we live in.

An Earth-born colonist/laborer on the distant planet Nilfheim has been recruited by a charismatic but dimwitted poseur/ex-senator/cult-leader whose “propogate the species” enterprise features a bird mascot. Too on the nose?

The laborer was in a jam and needed to get off Earth in the worst way, and being pretty dumb himself, he didn’t read the fine print on his contract.

Mickey isn’t just to be exploited, dictated to and endangered on the four and a half year journey to Nilfheim. He’s an “expendable,” to be treated as a guinea pig, lab rat, worker drone and canary in a coal mine by his employers, who cavalierly let him die or kill him off on dangerous jobs only to 3D print/process a new version of him, a perfect copy in appearance and a wholly updated adult with all the memories, up to the week, of oafish Mickey Barnes.

Every time he’s killed on a spacewalk, purposely exposed to deadly radiation for study and slowly murdered by being forced to test the atmosphere of Nilfheim as a lab rat as Science finds a vaccine to save the other, more valuable colonists, Mickey’s “number” changes.

“Mickey 17,” who narrates his story from its narrative midpoint beginning, with flashbacks and a story that picks up and takes him to his epiphany and final fate, is the incarnation of this sad sack we become most familiar with.

Robert Pattinson, once the Timothee Chalamet of his day, plays the various Mickeys in a sort of Keanu Reeve stupor/Buster Keaton stoicism. Mickey is known to all of the other colonists, a hapless object of fun who faces just one question from these tactless cultists over and over again.

“What’s it feel like to DIE?”

Mickey found love on the long voyage out, a cop/detective/soldier “agent” named Nasha (Naomi Ackie of “Blink Twice”), who revels in experimenting with the digital Kama Sutra with pretty-but-dim Mickey.

Mickey regards Timo, the partner (Steven Yeun of “Minari” and “Nope”) who got him into that fix on Earth, and into a more terminal one in space, as his best friend. On a ship packed with the cruel and tactless, Timo is a particularly loathsome, callous creep who’s used his partner as a scapegoat and thinks no more of killing him or letting him die than he would an ant trapped in an unflushed toilet.

Their Dear Leader on this church-driven colonization is cheerleading cult leader Kenneth Marshall, an unseated senator who found a new hustle and is leading the faithful to their new homes on an ice-covered hellhole of a planet.

Mark Ruffalo makes this puffed up dunce half Trump, half Elon Musk, a “celebrity” whose cunning wife (Toni Collette) is in his ear, trying to steer him clear of this scandal or that ugly revelation about how he REALLY feels about his red baseball-capped clown car of colonists.

Another police agent (Anamaria Vartolomei) seems to have the sweets for Mickey, for reasons we can’t guess, and the only compassionate member of the careless, cretinous science team Dorothy (Patsy Ferran) also seems to care for his well-being.

Everybody else just uses and abuses this non-union loser as they see fit.

“Snowpiercer,” “The Host” and “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho summons up memories of his least likable “hit” “Okja” with this icky, overlong wallow in “life is cheap for working folks around the world” allegory.

But in adapting Edward Ashton’s 2022 sci-fi novel “Mickey 7,” he references Big Idea films from “Brazil” to Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” even as he fails to find anything funny in the repeated deaths of R. Patts in an “Edge of Tomorrow” sense, a goof on that film’s “Let’s kill off a famous actor for laughs” humor.

Pattinson and the picture turn truly interesting when Mickey survives one expected death only to find he’s been regenerated as Mickey 18, a tougher, wise-to-his-exploitation and hellbent on avenging it “version” of the usually passive dullard Mickey is. There’s to be a struggle for Mickey’s place in reality between these mismatched two.

I loved all the threads Bong Joon Ho weaves into this narrative even as I lamented all the ones he leaves hanging. The narrative takes a “Close Encounters/Starship Troopers” turn that seems shoehorned in, reaches a half decent “Pandorum” climax and promptly wanders off into a stunning dull anti-climax.

Our writer-director leans on that lazy screen adapters crutch, voice-over narration, to carry too of the novel’s account of Mickey’s dreads and dreams and jokes about his plight.

“You read through the contract?” one and all ask Mickey as he signs on for a life of endless suicide missions destined to end badly. There’s a hint of generational angst as a guy who lost a lot of loan shark’s money on a macaron delivery business.

“I don’t have any skills,” Mickey admits. Might as well join a space colonization mission he’s sure to not survive — to repeatedly not survive.

But Pattinson is a sad but silly stitch in the title role. Ruffalo and Collette dial up their villainy and Ackie sexes things up even if Yeun seems a tad lost and miscast, too subtle and straight-laced for a farce this broad.

Sure, “Mickey 17” waters down its messaging by broadening that message to Netflix mini-series extremes (a better place for this movie, I fear). But if the movies are going to talk about labor, human rights, cruel “leaders” and love in the world Gen Z is growing up in, the raw deal facing Mickeys 1-17 is a good place to do it.

Rating: R, violence, sexual content, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Patsy Ferran, Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bong Joon Ho, based on a novel by Edward Ashton. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:17

Bond