Robert Pattinson stars in Bong Joon-ho's futuristic farce.

The last time someone groped Robert Pattinson aboard a spaceship, to the best of my knowledge, was in Claire Denis’s 2018 movie, “High Life.” The groper was a lowlife—a deranged doctor, bent on harvesting astronaut semen for pernicious procreative ends. Pattinson’s character, a self-declared celibate, was unconscious and unconsenting. The assault took place on the grottiest of vessels, manned by violent criminals who had been banished into deep space. The movie was a hell of a dark trip, but Pattinson, among the most consistently adventurous actors of his generation, kept you tethered to the story with an almost gravitational force. His unswerving conviction powered the film’s own.

“High Life” might one day make a nifty, nasty double bill with the loopy futuristic farce “Mickey 17,” the new film from the South Korean director and screenwriter Bong Joon-ho. Here is another gloomy spaceship, abounding in grim experiments and hostile personalities, with Pattinson once more playing a reluctant space traveller. Correction: he plays at least seventeen reluctant space travellers, all of whom are named Mickey Barnes, and none of whom are unduly bothered about celibacy. When one Mickey is playfully fondled by his girlfriend, Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a shock of ribald energy courses through the movie. He’s in capable hands, and so, in another sense, are we. In the often sterile cosmos of the Hollywood space opera, the mere acknowledgment of human horniness is a sign of intelligent life.