Bong Joon-Ho’s sci-fi comedy “Mickey 17” has one of the weirdest dinner scenes ever in a movie; not since Dan Aykroyd served Chevy Chase ants on a log in “Nothing but Trouble” has a character endured more during a meal. Watching the wild-eyed title character (Robert Pattinson) furiously saw through a plate of unidentifiable tissue as his hosts sing gospel songs and inject him with experimental serums, it’s easy to be reminded of the plateaus of insane surrealist slapstick Bong sustained in his last film “Parasite.”

The rest of the film doesn’t reach quite the same level of derangement, but few directors do this kind of left-of-center sci-fi entertainment better than Bong, whose credits include “Okja” and “Snowpiercer.” He’s aided by his cast, who create a cabal of genuinely interesting characters. Pattinson’s voice as Mickey 17 is annoying at first, an amalgam of Sid the sloth and Adam Sandler at his most supplicating, but when Mickey 18 pops out of the meat printer and the two get their double act going, it’s some of the best clone-meets-clone action since Michael Fassbender seduced himself in “Alien: Covenant.”

Why are there two Mickeys, or 17, or 18? In this future, dubious cloning technology banned on Earth allows space colonists to create expendable workers who can be reprinted with their memories intact if they die on a mission. Mickey is one such expendable, a failed entrepreneur who signed up for the job to escape his debts on Earth. He’s now on his 17th iteration, the earlier Mickeys having been killed in the colonists’ efforts to create a vaccine for the toxic air on the planet Niflheim (he gets as much thanks for his contributions to science as Henrietta Lacks). When he falls into a pit and is left for dead, he staggers back to base camp to find another Mickey has already been printed out. Hijinks ensue.

Meanwhile, ominous critters patrol the ice plains of Niflheim, circling the colonists’ crude outpost like the death-spiraling deer in “Flow.” The plot ultimately comes down to a conflict that was old hat even when “Avatar” came out in 2009: Some of the colonists want to kill the beasts, while others want to communicate with them and understand them.

The deeper and more interesting thread is the way the colonists take it for granted that Mickey is expected to die for them. His status as an expendable others him — the most offensive thing you can ask him is “what’s it like to die?” — and when a dangerous situation arises, he’s expected to immediately throw himself in harm’s way to save everyone else.

The assumption that suffering and dying is an acceptable way of life for some people and not for others goes a long way toward explaining how first-worlders are able to so easily numb themselves to horrors in Gaza and Sudan, or why the AIDS crisis was allowed to rage for so long.

There’s some subtle stuff going on in the margins of “Mickey 17.” Mark Ruffalo’s performance is not one of them. He plays Kenneth Marshall, a washed-up Earth demagogue trying his luck in the colonies. Your mileage may vary on his choice to play the character as a nearly spot-on impersonation of President Donald Trump — “The clouds of war are billowing,” he pontificates as the aliens putter aimlessly outside — but seeing as the movie takes place in 2054, it’s reasonable to assume that the character went to high school or college during the Trump years and is now doing an impersonation of an impersonation.

The movie’s whimsy occasionally becomes cloying. Bong leans into the cuteness of the alien life-forms too hard, and the circumstances of Mickey’s exile to outer space are so ludicrous it made the character slightly less believable.

Pattinson’s baby voice as Mickey 17 is a little grating, so it’s a relief when Mickey 18 appears to cut some of the twee with vinegary tough talk.

But Bong is a real artist, and he’s helped by a cast whose characters’ quirks and obsessions make them feel so much more real than the interchangeable redshirts in most movies like this. An always-welcome Steven Yeun creates a lovable dirtbag who weasels his way out of misbehavior by dialing up the cuteness. Naomi Ackie, so good in the otherwise drab thriller “Blink Twice,” plays Mickey’s girlfriend Nasha with a tart tongue and a limitless sexual imagination. Toni Collette plays a space-age socialite whose hauteur is matched by her eccentricity. Patsy Ferran plays an eager young scientist who eventually invents the translator used to communicate with the aliens, and when we finally hear the aliens talk, it turns out they’re just as interesting as everyone else.