There's a better Bong Joon Ho movie buried under Mickey 17

There is a telling scene toward the end of Bong Joon Ho's much delayed, much anticipated Mickey 17. In it, the titular 17 (Robert Pattinson) stands shivering on the loading dock of his spaceship over the snow planet Niflheim. Beside him is his clone, Mickey 18 (Robert Pattinson), just as burdened by gadgetry and the convoluted, interwoven plots that got him there as his partner. 

The two are strapped with explosives, equipped with machetes and on the hunt for "sauce" from the circling mob of pill-bug aliens — all elements introduced from scattered, incomplete b-plots that have only now had a chance to converge. And turning to his partner, 17 introduces yet another element.

He brings up a memory he can't help but hold on to: The mysterious red button he pushed as a child, long before he became a clone — the one on the dashboard of his mother's car, which lead to the accident that killed her.

"I told you, man," 18 replies. "You gotta let that go."

Here's the thing. My memory's not perfect, but unless it's very bad, I don't think the two of them had ever actually discussed this memory before.

And it is true, I really may have missed a quick nod to the moment somewhere between space battles, philosophical rambling and an equal parts creepy and confusing dream sequence. But to be fair to this poor, overloaded reviewer, the fact that there's too much here to hold onto is kind of the main problem. 

At its heart, Mickey 17 is about a man who finds himself in dire financial straits and sells himself into servitude as an "expendable" on a space expedition. These workers are given what may be the most undesirable job in this near-future hellscape: dying.

Being an expendable's not all that bad. When they die, their memories are all digitally preserved then re-uploaded into a cloned body, printed by a reconstitution machine that uses all manners of organic material (banana peels, human waste, dead bodies) to spit out a shiny new Mickey — like an abnormally reliable inkjet. 

That makes them particularly valuable for dangerous experiments. Need to see how long it takes for radiation to kill a human in space? Send Mickey out there. Got a pesky alien virus problem? Infect Mickey and test the vaccines on him.

And there are plenty of dangerous experiments courtesy of Mark Ruffalo's Kenneth Marshall, the leader of the expedition who is no doubt at least partially inspired by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — with a healthy dose of Jim Jones thrown in.

Marshall's wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), whispers advice in his ear like a coiffed Wormtongue. She willfully tortures captured aliens, and from her, we get some insight into at least one of the movie's meanings: "Sauce is the true litmus test for civilization." 

If you're wondering what exactly she means by sauce, don't worry, so is everyone else. Sometimes, it's an approximation of food — perhaps alien tails blended together in some sort of space-age Magic Bullet — and other times it's just blood drops wiped up from the floor. 

Either way, it's an interesting enough metaphor: the uber-rich of a space-exploring future so cartoonishly disconnected from the value of human life that they lust after the ground up goop of its constituent parts, be it in a sauce that's consumed, or the kind used for printing out a bunch of Mickeys. It's an enticing lens that's interesting enough to craft an entire movie around. 

Unfortunately, Mickey 17 also crafts itself around the Mickeys' duelling sense of self. After 17 survives an assignment he wasn't supposed to, 18 is accidentally cloned before the current Mickey actually dies. It's a huge error, since both clones being alive at the same time constitutes a serious enough offence to warrant the Mickeys' permanent execution. This is all based on a convoluted backstory involving a psychopathic serial killer, once again explained in Mickey 17's overused voiceover exposition dumps.