An intimate sci-fi epic, comical yet serious, romantic and gleefully bonkers, “Mickey 17” is South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho’s first film since winning a record-busting four Academy Awards five years ago for “Parasite.”

As the Motion Picture Academy’s first non-English speaking Best Picture winner, was “Parasite” paralyzing for Bong?  Was it intimidating to decide what’s next?

“It was so great what happened and very surprising,” Bong explained via an interpreter in a post-screening discussion. “But it wasn’t like I was too overly excited about it.

“Actually, when Quentin Tarantino won an Oscar, at the time he was maybe 31 years old. But I,” he laughed, “was already in my early 50s. So I was quite calm and level-headed throughout that whole process. And I just continue to do what I’ve always been doing.”

“Mickey 17” takes place in a future where humans, no longer able to live on Earth, are on a 4-year space voyage to colonize an ice-covered new world.  Robert Pattinson’s Mickey Barnes, desperately troubled, volunteers to be an Expendable, a human who can be repeatedly killed, then immediately reborn via cloning.

Bong adapted Edward Ashton’s novel “Mickey 7” and immediately added 10 lives as Mickey is continually revived on a 3D printer.

Bong also invented a wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) to partner the film’s hideously amusing if not so bright dictator (Mark Ruffalo).

“Ashton’s novel is about human printing, and I was just fascinated by that. Also, human printing is quite different from the cloning and replicant stories that we’ve seen before. Because we’re literally printing out human beings.

“To me,” Bong said, “if you see the words ‘human printing’ as a concept, it’s two words that should never really be combined. We shouldn’t really be printing out human beings.

“In that concept we sense how it’s just totally denigrating humanity. I felt there was a lot of comedy and tragedy in that concept.”

Pattinson was ideal, he joked, “Because he looks like he probably gets the short end of the stick for everything. Some unfortunate things happen to him all the time. He just kind of has that look.”

As for Ruffalo’s cruel, petty, incompetent Kenneth Marshall, “We modeled the character based on people from the past. But I think a lot of people see the present in his character, perhaps because history always repeats itself,” Bong said.

“When we were in Europe screening the film, a lot of people talked about political leaders from their own countries and just started projecting like stressful political memories of their times onto his character.

“That just goes to show how Mark was able to make this character quite universal, and express this archetype of a bad political leader.”

“Mickey 17” is in theaters