*This article contains spoilers for the film Mickey 17.

Whether it’s the front and tail sections of the train in “Snowpiercer” or the luxurious mansion and the semi-basement in “Parasite,” filmmaker Bong Joon Ho is a recognized master when it comes to visualizing class hierarchy in capitalist society. Bong’s imagination now takes us into the cosmos in “Mickey 17,” where his signature striking imagery of the money-driven hierarchical order is on full display right from the opening scenes. Mickey 17 (Robert Pattinson) is assigned the task of capturing creepers, an indigenous species on the icy planet Niflheim, until his mission leads him to fall into a deep crevasse and face certain death. Timo (Steven Yeun), a pilot working on the same project, nearly comes to the rescue, but decides he’s not going to go that deep to save Mickey. Not willing to put himself in harm’s way, Timo turns smug and asks, “What’s it feel like to die?” Pointing out that a dead Mickey 17 will be reprinted as Mickey 18 the next day anyway, Timo grabs Mickey’s flamethrower instead and leaves without another thought. Even on Niflheim, the frozen planet in the running to become humanity’s backup plan, the familiar systems of social and class hierarchy are alive and well, with Timo comfortable at the top of the gaping crevasse and Mickey sprawled out in the deep depths below.

As Nasha (Naomi Ackie) says, Mickey was always just Mickey. Working within the constraints of the power dynamics all around him, Mickey becomes an Expendable. Much like Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) in “Parasite,” who falls into debt after his Taiwanese style castella shop goes belly up, it’s a moment of cinematic deja vu when Mickey chooses to become an Expendable after racking up a massive bill attempting to run a macaron shop. Viewers aware of the briefly lived “fatcaron” craze that swept Korea will instantly recognize this unmistakable mark of Bong’s brand of humor that’s always rooted in reality. To escape the clutches of the ruthless loan shark Darius Blank (Ian Hanmore), Mickey voluntarily signs up to be an Expendable and take on the most perilous tasks aboard the spaceship he’ll be joining. An Expendable is easily cloned by a 3D printer, with their memories restored from backup. The idea of being expendable can be gussied up by saying it makes you immortal, but more accurately speaking, it’s a label to describe easily replaceable labor.The modern practice of outsourcing high-risk tasks, which absolves employers of all liability, finds its intergalactic counterpart in Expendables like Mickey. Because he accepted the position, Mickey is expected to be in constant peril and is reduced to nothing more than a lab rat.

Once again, Mickey was always just Mickey. Working within the constraints of the power dynamics all around him, Mickey is ultimately condemned to become an Expendable. The character Timo is Bong’s invention, drawing inspiration from the character Berto in “Mickey7,” the Edward Ashton novel on which the movie is based. But unlike Berto, who’s gifted academically and athletically and makes an impressive pilot, Timo is mediocre at best, not so different from Mickey. Whereas Ashton depicts the way the talented Berto is treated better in relation to the decidedly untalented Mickey, Bong seems to say that there should be no disparity in the value placed on human life just because someone is more skilled or useful. It’s here that you can really feel Bong’s signature sharp critique. The director underscores how, when power dynamics lead to hierarchies being formed, there’s always going to be someone who’s exclusively tasked with handling the deadly work. We see this satirized when Bong shows Mickey’s colleagues flipping a coin to pass the time while he’s being reprinted, or reacting excitedly when Mickey loses his hand (“Did you see that?”). The characters’ detached treatment of Mickey, as an Expendable separate from the rest of them, harkens to how people in capitalist societies today grow numb to the flood of news about workplace injuries.

But is this really a Mickey problem? If you really look at Mickey, you’ll end up seeing laborers in the real world. Korean office workers will ridicule themselves, saying they’re being “ground down.” The phrase evokes an image of being sucked in, chewed up, and spit out by whatever they’re working on. This goes beyond the idea of crunch mode, though—short-term bouts of intense work made up for afterward by downtime or with extra incentives. Koreans use the grinding down metaphor when they work long beyond their paid hours, using up their nights and weekends, to the detriment of their health. Workers are especially likely to use the expression when such a heavy workload doesn’t actually have an endpoint, repeating in a long, endless loop—just like Mickey experiences. But just what is being ground down in the process? Health and time, certainly. But there’s more to it than that. As workers sacrifice their health and forgo all personal time at the mercy of their jobs, even their sense of self is slowly whittled away at. They may eventually get their work done by taking on work outside the scope of their job, kissing their nights goodbye, and helplessly accepting the chronic fatigue, but their entire identity gets fed piece by piece into the grinder—just like the countless Mickeys who disappear into oblivion.

And what is all that grinding ultimately leading up to? Sauce. Ylfa (Toni Collette), wife of Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and an avid foodie, absolutely reveres sauce, considering it the pinnacle of civilization itself. Much like Mason (Tilda Swinton) in “Snowpiercer” upholds order by asserting that “you wouldn’t wear a shoe on your head,” Ylfa’s life on the spaceship is luxurious thanks to Mickey’s grueling labor. The sauces she enjoys—civilization writ large—are what come out of the proverbial machine that grinds Mickey down. And it’s important to note that all her sauces are crimson in color. When she invites Mickey to a banquet and serves him lab-grown meat, she drenches it in a scarlet sauce until it’s reminiscent of raw meat. She even grinds creeper tails into a blender to create more red sauce. Later, in Mickey’s nightmare towards the end of the film, Ylfa offers him some dark crimson sauce. The fact that these sauces are always shades of red, underscoring that the foundation of Ylfa’s peak civilization—what she calls sauce—is built by grinding others down, suggests it’s made from the sacrifices of individuals like Mickey and the lives of the nonhuman creepers alike.

Is Mason’s social order or Ylfa’s sauce–civilization pairing the ultimate truth? Bong, at least, seems to reject that idea. Many will recall the scene in “Snowpiercer” where security specialist Namgoong Minsoo (Song Kang-ho) urges Curtis (Chris Evans) not to try and make it to the front of the train but to get off altogether, saying, “You might take it as a wall. But it’s a f—ing gate.” In other words, his suggestion is not to internalize the capitalist order and struggle to climb up, but to break free from the system altogether. Similarly, Mickey 17 and Mickey 18, in their own way, break free from Ylfa’s sauce theory of civilization. When Ylfa orders the two Mickeys to each cut off and retrieve 100 creeper tails, they blatantly ignore her. Even when she tries to get them to move by pitting them against each other with the promise to spare the winner’s life and blow the loser up, neither of the clones budges. In fact, they don’t even try, even without one having to suggest it as a plan to the other. Who among us wouldn’t be desperately cutting off tails left and right if thrown out into the cold with a bomb strapped to them? Marshall’s as smugly confident as ever when he says, “They’ll start chopping tails as soon as they realize one of them has to outlive the other.” But his assumption proves false when the Mickeys soon seek out the Mama Creeper and attempt to communicate with her.

The movie is essentially over once the Mickeys stage this strike of theirs, coming to the kind of quintessentially Bong ending with his signature commentary on capitalism. On first viewing, like the rest of the audience, I found the feel-good ending forced. The rushed montage where Mickey briefly speaks to each character’s fate felt like a particular letdown to me—almost like a collection of short-form videos. But when I watched it a second time, it became clear that the film had already said all it needed to before it even got to that part. Before the film even gets to the parade of each character’s forced happy ending, and even before the nightmare scene that precedes it, the movie has already done its job. When Mickey 17 meets his colleague Mickey 18 (essentially himself) and awakens to the absurdity of putting up with the worst possible working conditions as an Expendable, he refuses to carry on as before. Though once treated as less than a flamethrower or a carpet, and offering up the words “thank you for dinner” after enduring experiments in artificial meat production, Mickey 17 is changed. Now, he stages his own form of strike in the middle of a blizzard. This, perhaps, is the true finale of the film—there are no loose threads, and everything wraps up in one neat package. Faced with the choice between living as an Expendable who harms those different from himself or going on strike, Mickey opts for what amounts to a strike and escape. In doing so, the Mickeys collectively refuse to be ground down any longer. And at last, they are no longer Mickey 17 or Mickey 18, but just Mickey Barnes.