Review | Netflix movie review: Space Sweepers – Song Joong-ki heads for the stars in Korea’s first big-budget sci-fi adventure
- Space Sweepers is packed with dogfights and androids, with the Earth on the brink of disaster
- The film lacks imagination and comes off like an attempt to tick all the right sci-fi boxes
2.5/5 stars
Jo Sung-hee’s Space Sweepers, South Korea’s first big-budget space adventure, was supposed to hit cinemas last summer, but after the pandemic scuppered those plans it fell to Netflix to swoop in and save the day.
The film is packed to bursting with interstellar dogfights, robot sidekicks and wicked megalomaniacs, while the fate of the Earth hangs precariously in the balance. But it is so encumbered by its mission to get Korean cinema up to speed in the science fiction game that it feels more like an exhaustive box-ticking exercise designed by committee than the bold realisation of a coherent cinematic vision.
In the year 2092, Earth’s pollution levels are so toxic that a new colony, replete with green fields and breathable air, is being developed on Mars, overseen by the altruistic UTS corporation. However, only the wealthy elite can afford to relocate, leaving billions stranded back home.
Meanwhile, Song Joong-ki (A Werewolf Boy) and Kim Tae-ri ( The Handmaiden ) lead a ragtag crew of garbage collectors who patrol the solar system taking out the trash. When they stumble on a young android girl, revealed to be a stolen weapon of mass destruction, they see an opportunity to sell “Dorothy” back to the radicals who stole her.
Recalling the blue-collar rogues of Alien, Star Wars, and especially Guardians of the Galaxy , each of the “space sweepers” comes with their own emotional baggage, which invariably reveals a more noble life that has hit the skids.
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Tae-ho (Song) was in the military, has a missing daughter about Dorothy’s age, and has unsettled grievances with UTS chairman Sullivan (Richard Armitage, channelling Steve Jobs’ evil twin). As Captain Jang, Kim is saddled with a horrifying mullet and a shady pirate backstory, while Tiger Park (Jin Seon-kyu) is the big-hearted muscle and Bags (Yoo Hae-jin) is a robot, because every spaceship needs one.
Science fiction has always been the genre of the imagination, where new concepts and ideas are developed and explored, but considering how much happens in Space Sweepers, it has precious little to say.
The ecological disaster threatening the Earth is barely addressed, unlike in Frant Gwo’s superior but not wholly dissimilar The Wandering Earth . Jo’s good guys are no-nonsense Koreans, the bad guys are untrustworthy foreigners, and everything else is just a desolate void where his crew re-enact the fantasies of George Lucas, Ridley Scott and Neill Blomkamp, rather than create any of their own.
Space Sweepers is streaming on Netflix.
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