In “Mickey 17” (in theaters) Robert Pattinson plays a former pastry chef and an amiable dimwit who applies for a lousy, inevitably lethal job on a contaminated ice planet. As an Expendable, Mickey goes into the worst sorts of situations, dies in some horrible way — you know, for the mission — then gets cloned over and over again to take on the next awful task. At various points he’s irradiated, instructed to breathe in a deadly space virus, left for dead in a cave full of space bugs, used as a guinea pig in a series of failed experiments, and fed bad meat.

In many Hollywood movies about clones, the doppelgängers are just as expendable as Mickey, created to perform all sorts of dangerous and unpleasant tasks humans would rather not do. They work on lunar mines (“Moon”) and in theme parks (the cloned assassins in “Futureworld”); they labor as super soldiers (the clone troopers of the Star Wars franchise) and organ donors (“Parts: The Clonus Horror”).

Most don’t know they’re expendable, of course, and aren’t all that keen about their situations if they do. “Mickey 17” is an outlier here: an expendable who becomes one willingly, actually writing “expendable” on his job application. Eventually, however, Mickey tires of the drudgery of dying painfully day after miserable day. Who wouldn’t?

Movies about these genetic sad sacks run the gamut of genres, from horror and sci-fi to action films and dramedies. Filmmakers use clones to ponder questions about fate and free will and what it means to be human; various films have examined such disparate topics as the nature of sentience (“Blade Runner”); U.S. race relations (“They Cloned Tyrone”); and the very ethics of cloning itself (“Never Let Me Go”). Here are five notables from an admittedly fringe genre.