Expendable Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17

LINE up a long list of particularly annoying elements these crazy, end-of-empire days seem to offer, and drape a satire over them.

That’s what director Bong Joon-ho has done with Mickey 17: this slapdash dark comedy grabs Trump’s MAGA movement and shakes it furiously, hoping one of its many sarcastic jibes will stick.

It’s as if Joon-ho set up everything today’s neo-capitalist society stands for and scatter-gunned custard pies in its direction.

Joon-ho doesn’t bother with subtlety: this sci-fi has a fascist megalomaniac Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) who plans to jet into space with a crew of chosen people. Once arrived at the planet earmarked for colonisation, he’ll breed a White Supremacist’s vision of a future race, slaughter millions of space creatures and create a worker drone class, born by a 3-D printer, to do the heavy lifting. Just one of these well-worn, far-right day dreams would have sufficed for a plot, but instead Joon-ho scrambles the whole lot together.

Mickey (Robert Pattison) and his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) have borrowed cash from a loan shark to create a macaron cafe. When it fails and the debt is called in, the only answer appears to be signing up to join a Christian evangelistic Nazi movement who are blasting off from a climate-wrecked Earth to establish a new golden order among the stars.

Mickey wangles his way on board by signing up as an Expendable – a 3D-printed human that is used for jobs that inevitably end in death. Once a Mickey is killed, he is simply reprinted, and his memories, stored on a hard drive, are uploaded. Off he goes again to be infected with deadly viruses, doused in radiation, and do some dangerous bits of DIY about the space craft.

As the voyage progresses, Mickey falls in love with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who can handle the fact her boyfriend is constantly dying and then reborn.

But when Mickey 17 survives one seemingly deadly incident, a Mickey 18 has already been printed, leading to an ethical question.

This kicker sees the plot veer off into a storyboard apparently based on a drunken game of consequences, diluting the humour and message.

The satire is far from subtle: Marshall’s followers wear red baseball caps, and we are treated to grandstand speeches with a message that commmitting genocide is a horrible way to spend a day. Over-egged and over-played, Pattison’s excellent performance holds together a film that overwise tries too hard.