directed by Jo Sung Hee
written by Yoon Seung-Min, Yoo-Kang Seo-Ae and Jo Sung Hee
Next up for a review is Netflix's recent Korean made, sci-fi action pic Space Sweepers, starring Song Joong-Ki, Kim Tae Ri, Jin Seon-Kyu, Yoo Hae-Jin, Park Ye-Rin and British actor Richard Armitage as the bad guy.
Set in the year 2092, the film, as the title suggests, is about a group of space scavengers who earn a living by salvaging, with their space dredger the Victory, the detritus of various space activities of the human race, like junked satellites, spaceships and other space flotsam. Earth has become virtually uninhabitable, so a monolithic corporation, UTS, has established an oribiting space city for the affluent, with the rest of humanity compelled to live in squalor and pollution. To find humanity a new home, the CEO of UTS, the mysterious James Sullivan (Armitage), has ambitions of colonizing Mars. None of this really matters to the cew of the Victory, namely Tae Ho (Song), Captain Jang (Kim), Tiger Park (Jin) and their robotic crewmate Bub (voiced by Yoo), who merely want to earn a living. That changes, though, when in one of their jobs, the crew come upon a most unexpected salvage: a little girl named Dororthy (Park Ye-Rin) who may hold either the key to humanity's salvation, or its destruction. This causes a lot of interested parties, including the shadowy Black Fox, and UTS, to come down on the four salvagers like a ton of bricks.
Considering that this movie was produced for the equivalent of about $20 million USD, it has astonishing production value. The CGI is easily on par with that of some Hollywood productions that can cost anywhere from three to four times what this film did, and it's really impressive that they used that technology to create a world that looked truly lived-in and grungy, like the truly memorable space adventures like the first Star Wars film or Guardians of the Galaxy. The lead actors were all quite likable, and even in their constant bickering had good onscreen chemistry, so it was a lot of fun to watch them go at it back and forth. Finally, the action was, for the most part, very well-staged, and seemed to take its cues from some of the more memorable space movies of the last few decades.
Therein, unfortunately, lies one of the film's problems: it's notably derivative. It borrows from a whole slew of films and even TV shows ranging from Star Wars to Neil Blomkamp's Elysium and even Netflix's own sci-fi series Altered Carbon. In the climactic battle, I swear I could hear Brian Tyler's briefly used Marvel Fanfare playing in the music score. I know a lot of movies borrow heavily from their predecessors in the genre (The Matrix, anyone?) and in some instances it's done in loving homage, but I have to say that here they borrowed a tad too liberally at times.
While it's a problem I acknowledge, though, it didn't really affect my enjoyment of the film.
What DID affect my viewing experience, though, was quite a bit of illogical, hackneyed writing in the third act, a poorly-written villain in Armitage's James Sullivan and, apart from Armitage, some of the worst acting I've seen from the film's non-Korean cast, which is so bad it doesn't even approximate cable TV movie quality. Seriously, not even Cable TV quality.
Still, for all its flaws, I got through 2/3 of the movie just enjoying myself, which was more than enough to sustain me for when the third act silliness started kicking in. It's a noticeably flawed movie, but still a better use of your time than sulking at home during quarantine.
7/10
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