SPACE SWEEPERS is a South Korean movie from 2021 that I first watched in February of 2022. I know that because when I went to save this document I discovered the partial review I wrote back then, but got too busy to finish. Recently I was thinking about the movie, watched it again, and I’m excited to share it with anyone who missed it. (It’s on Netflix.)
This is in that sub-genre I love that some call “space truckers” – a sci-fi fantasy about a working class crew doing a space job in their junky, jerry-rigged but beloved space-hooptie. It’s both their vehicle and their home, a cramped quarters but with a plant and other items of comfort, a small kitchen, a table for playing cards. They’re a ragtag crew of good-hearted rejects like you get in SPACE ADVENTURE COBRA, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, Cowboy Bebop, SPACE TRUCKERS, SERENITY, etc., but this time the world they inhabit is a very pointed, acidic portrait of our current capitalistic hellscape. Four years ago it seemed very of-the-moment, and now it seems even more accurate than it did then. The truth hurts, but director Jo Sung-hee (A WEREWOLF BOY, PHANTOM DETECTIVE) still manage to make a fun popcorn movie about it.
It’s set in 2092, when the earth is so polluted that the well-off and their employees have moved to a new civilization on an orbiting platform run by the UTS corporation, soon to be transferred to the alleged paradise of a terraformed Mars. Of course they’ve already filled space with so much garbage that many people (including our heroes) make their living flying around picking up junk trying to find things they can sell.
Well, maybe “make a living” is too strong of a phrase. They’re in an endless cycle of debt that started with fixing up their ship, Victory. Early in the movie they make a good score but get fined for crashing into an antenna while retrieving it, so when they cash in the merchandise they still owe more than they did in the first place.
It gets sadder. The motive of the main character, Kim Tae-ho (Song Joon-ki, A WEREWOLF BOY), is to raise enough money to find his daughter. By which I mean pay for a service that will locate her body floating in space before it leaves orbit. In the opening scene he goes to the UTS Lost & Found Integrated Warehouse and tries to trade rice (“real rice, not the molecular stuff”) for a look at a body he thinks might be her.
It’s not. And he has to trade his shoes to find that out. We first see him flying the ship in his socks, holes in both with the big toes sticking out. Later he’s thrilled to find a pair of shoes; still later the sole of one starts to fall off and he has to glue it back together. Usually in a space opera you don’t have time to appreciate the importance of having a decent pair of shoes, but this one is different.
Tae-ho has a military background, which explains why he can defend himself, but it’s not treated quite the same as in most movies. He was a child soldier who, when he was 20, adopted an orphan baby he found, and didn’t believe in the things he’d been doing, which got him fired. He mostly avoids fighting now and is more about problem solving. But he’s good at his job, willing to make risky moves. Rival crews get so pissed when the Victory swoops in. The crew also includes the infamous radical Captain Jang (Kim Tai-ri, THE HANDMAIDEN, ALIENOID), former drug lord Tiger Park (Jin Seon-kyu, THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD), and reprogrammed military robot Bubs (Yoo Hae-jin, EXHUMA).
They’re one of those crews who love each other but have to be reminded of that after they fight a bunch. Tiger suspects the captain of stealing the rice to pay for booze and comes after her with his engraved ax. He’s a tough guy with neck tattoos and long dreadlocks, and one of his jobs is to manually pull a crank that spins a wheel that powers the ship. He’s kind of the Drax or the B.A., the scariest one who’s also the most lovable. Unless the most lovable is Bubs, whose metal face just has two immovable lights for eyes and a blank space that sometimes lights up with an animated mouth or a question mark. I gotta respect a battle droid who insists on wearing a cool track jacket or pullover hoodie.
The inciting incident is when they find a little girl (Park Ye-rin) hidden in the storage of a derelict ship. They’re annoyed by the prospect of having to take care of a kid, but then they realize that this specific one has been on the news, which tells them she’s an android named Dorothy stolen by a terrorist group called the Black Foxes and fitted with a hydrogen bomb. After some terror that she’s gonna kill them by sneezing or something they hatch a plot to sell her back to the Black Foxes.
There’s lots of comedy involving their amateurish antics – negotiating the ransom, making stupid disguises (a space helmet covered in duct tape), hiding Dorothy from a police inspection. Of course it turns out that she’s not what they’re saying (she’s actually a human girl named Kot-nim, and not a bomb, but she does hold the key to the future of the species or some shit) and neither are the Black Foxes, and more complications ensue.
Though it’s mostly in Korean, it’s a multi-cultural universe with characters who speak Arabic, Chinese, Filipino, French, Spanish, Danish and Russian. Some people will only speak English, such as UTS founder James Sullivan (Richard Armitage, OCEAN’S 8), the alleged visionary and “savior of humanity” trying to colonize Mars. He comes off as less of a total fucking idiot jackass than the real life Mars billionaire we obviously have to compare him to, but the point is made. He will pretend to save the world while fucking over everyone, he will erase scientific research that endangers his business, he will kill everybody, he will get off on it.
They also make a big deal about him being 152 years old, which makes me think of that other tech CEO freak who supposedly is super ultra youthful healthy because he transfers his teenage son’s blood into his veins. (For the record that guy’s younger than me and looks older and I have never done any mad science experiments at all.) Whatever Sullivan’s doing causes a health issue where he flies into a rage and his veins start popping out. All his minions fearfully bow their heads and say nothing.
On a second viewing I thought Sullivan was kind of a weak spot for the movie. He’s easy to hate but he doesn’t really have the screen presence of a great villain. He does the job of antagonist but I think there’s an imbalance because the rest of the movie is so good. But I’m not gonna knock a movie for being partly about “CEO bad,” because CEO is in fact bad. We shouldn’t stop saying it. But fortunately there’s plenty more going on here.
There are are police in this world, but most of the policing we see is by soldiers who work for the corporation and who wear expensive, state-of-the-art HALO type armor. And they’re bastards. Their helmets are weird looking enough that I kept forgetting they were human – the natural evolution of all that tactical bullshit we pay for cops to hide behind when they stomp on us. (How does he go to the bathroom with all that shit on?)
There are some characters who have bought into the system without necessarily seeming like assholes. I felt that way about the woman at the desk who congratulates Tae-ho on finally having the $400,000 to pay to find his daughter’s body. I think she’s genuinely happy for him, and of course at this point in her life she doesn’t think much about how monstrous this all is.
Another little thing going on in the movie is that Bubs seems to be trans? She’s played by a male actor but when Kot-nim calls her “Lady” Bubs says, “‘Lady’? You just made me day,” and confides that she wants to get skin grafts and change her bone structure. But it’s illegal and she can’t afford it anyway. I hesitate to bring this up in the commentary portion of this review, though, because it doesn’t come across as a message. It shouldn’t have to. Just a character doing what they want to be happy and their friends obviously supporting it because they’re friends.
I want to repeat that although SPACE SWEEPERS is “about capitalism” or whatever, it’s not at the expense of being a fun romp. I was gonna say it’s no more of a homework movie than ROBOCOP or SNOWPIERCER, but that might still give the wrong idea because it’s a lighter tone than either of those. The FX (done by a South Korean company called Dexter Studios) look as good or better than some Hollywood productions, and the space sweeping scenes have some thrills – outmaneuvering other ships, trying not to crash, shooting grappling hooks, Bubs walking on the outside of the ship. And it’s not just in space – there seem to be tons of huge sets, most of it is very tactile, lots of cool devices and chunky computers and things. It really feels like you could and should run around in this place, pick things up and mess with them.
But the world wouldn’t be enough, it’s these characters you want to be with, this dirty-almost-half-dozen including the little girl who brings out the best of them. Picking up garbage is a cool space adventure when you get to hang out with these guys.
SPACE SWEEPERS was made for theatrical release in South Korea, but got delayed because of COVID, and then if I understand correctly they just sold it to Netflix worldwide. There was a sequel announced, but that was five years ago, so I won’t hold my breath. But at least this one is floating out there waiting to be swept.
