With “Mickey 17,” Bong Joon-ho seems to have ascended to his fully actualized Pokémon form as a filmmaker, by achieving a synthesis of the pitch-black comedy, scathing social commentary and ambitious sci-fi concepts of 2006’s “The Host,” 2013’s “Snowpiercer” and 2019’s “Parasite.”

Surprisingly for a film with such a dark premise, “Mickey 17” is also arguably Bong’s most humane and ultimately upbeat narrative, buoyed considerably by the amiably dumb shaggy-dog energy of Robert Pattinson as our title character, who’s remarkably passive for a protagonist.

From “Snowpiercer” to “Parasite,” Bong’s class consciousness has called attention to how the extreme conditions of poverty compromise our essential humanity, twisting society’s have-nots into misshapen parodies of people, like the Morlocks in H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine.”

For Pattinson’s Mickey Barnes, a luckless schnook who’s fleeing an environmentally despoiled Earth in a bid to free himself from life-threatening debts, this means volunteering to become an “expendable,” a disposable worker tasked with lethal assignments, then cloned back to life from recyclable refuse and genetic material, and loaded with the latest back-up file of his memories.

To pay for his trip on the spaceship that will colonize the aptly named frost planet Niflheim, Mickey dies and is reprinted enough times to reach his 17th incarnation, who unexpectedly survives an ostensibly certain death while surveying the planet, but returns to the colony ship to find they’ve gone ahead and printed out Mickey 18 anyway, assuming Mickey 17 bit the dust.

Entire subgenres of science fiction have been devoted to exploring the ethical and practical considerations raised by cloning, but Bong makes it morbidly amusing by showing such serious matters being weighed by a declining society run by shallow, corrupt, quasi-religious plutocrats.

While Pattinson’s Mickey 17 is just dim and well-meaning enough to resemble an endearingly overgrown puppy, Mark Ruffalo as the vainglorious leader of the colonial expedition is blaringly, offensively stupid, to the point that his proud ignorance and cult-of-personality platitudes feel like a personal assault, in ways Bong assuredly intended to remind us of a few current newsmakers.

Ruffalo’s badly capped horse-teeth and mouth-breathingly nasal, flat voice are well-matched by the piranha smile of Toni Collette as his more manipulative yet equally vapid wife, whose obsession with culinary sauces recalls Gwyneth Paltrow’s affluent lifestyle consumerism.

Ruffalo’s self-appointed head of both church and state on Niflheim is so infuriatingly unfit to govern that I physically felt a cathartic release from the profanity-laden verbal dressing-down his arrogant, slack-jawed character receives during the film’s third act, especially as the rest of the colonists under his thumb finally behave with understated yet rousing compassion and courage.

The creature design of the native inhabitants of Niflheim fits the eclectic aesthetic Bong favored in “The Host,” as “the creepers,” as they’re branded by the colonists, are essentially a mashup of caterpillars and wooly mammoths, with buzzsaw mouths like Stephen King’s Langoliers.

And yet, the third-act conflict is such an empathetic “Darmok” cross-species contact scenario that it could sustain a solidly B-grade episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” all by itself.

Credit is due here to Naomi Ackie, whose character could be called Mickey’s girlfriend, except that she possesses so much competence and proactive agency within the narrative, enough to offer their colony some hope for the future, that it’s more accurate to call Mickey her boyfriend.

Ackie’s character is even allowed to take ownership of her sexuality, in frank and funny ways that subvert the traditional dynamics of the male gaze, as she gushes over having two Mickeys.

Steven Yeun delivers a memorable performance in a relatively minor role as Mickey’s scumbag user “best friend,” who remorselessly got him into debt in the first place, as he demonstrates the breadth of his range, and continues a winning streak of recent roles to rival Jack Quaid’s run.

“Mickey 17” proves even movies with stridently satirical messages can still be big, dumb fun.