It’s been nearly six years since South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, which, little to our knowledge at that moment, would be just the first of many victorious spots for the lauded social satire. The culmination of that journey would be at the Academy Awards, where the film made history by being the first foreign language feature to be awarded the prize for Best Motion Picture. Of course, with that much success comes the raising of the bar, and the inevitable questions of what’s next for a filmmaker who’s earned himself a blank check for whatever his heart desires.

$120 million was the amount of cash that Warner Bros. plunked down to lure Bong back to the United States for this third English-language film, the first two being Snowpiercer and Okja, respectively. And while no follow-up to Parasite could possibly live up to the incredibly high standards placed upon it, Mickey 17 is an extreme disappointment no matter how you slice it.

Between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk’s continuous efforts to commodify space, the stars we all share are beginning to lose their shimmer. The final frontier is now merely another capitalist hellscape to run away from your problems on Earth, which is exactly what Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) does after he gets in some deep water with a loan shark with an unhealthy obsession with dismembering the people who fall into his debt. With no special skills to differentiate him from the overcrowded employment lines, he signs up to be an “expendable,” where his memories and body schematics will be downloaded so that he can be reprinted/cloned whenever he dies. It’s only fitting that the most advanced technology that the human race has ever wielded is mostly used to more efficiently exploit the working man.

The title comes from the fact that the iteration we become accustomed to is the seventeenth version of him, the previous sixteen dying in the name of “science” as the crew of his spaceship tries to colonize the icy planet Niflheim. Mark Ruffalo plays the ship’s commander, Kenneth Marshall, in one the laziest and most exhaustive Trump / corrupt egotistical politician impressions we’ve been inundated with over this past decade. Bong already reared his head around this territory with Tilda Swinton’s awkward corporate head honcho in Okja. These results are much more simplified, even down to the red hats that Marshall’s supporters don and his constant need for approval.

Pattinson’s nasally narration is very much in “tell, don’t show” mode, rendering several scenes in need of the mute button. At the very least, it would allow for Jung Jae-il’s score and Darius Khondji’s cinematography to be more appreciated, the former reconfiguring the intense piano rhythms of Parasite into something a little more fluttery. There are so many ethical questions and dilemmas that Bong’s script, and adaptation of the Edward Ashton novel, could have investigated further or with more precision. Instead, everything is painted with the broadest brush possible, arming the satire with the same weight as a cold open from Saturday Night Live.

Pattinson’s commitment to the role in all its eccentricities is what keeps the ship from capsizing sooner. That goes double when he gets preemptively reprinted for the eighteenth time, leaving everyone seeing double. Naomi Ackie plays his lover Nasha, although there really isn’t much to say about her. It’s one of the few times that the line “I don’t know what she sees in me,” can be shared by both the character and audience.

There is one ingenious moment when they initially meet, and we don’t hear the conversation they share. All we see are their mouths moving, the gleeful expressions on their faces, and the joyous thoughts running through their heads as they realize they each found the person right for them. Bong has long held compassion for his characters, even if his view of humanity is never the rosiest. If only he shared some of that compassion for the audience’s intelligence for this go around.