Space Sweepers: A hoot 'n' a holler

Space Sweepers (2021) • View trailer

3.5 stars. Rated TV-MA, for profanity and sci-fi violence

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.12.21

This South Korean sci-fi epic — the country’s first “space blockbuster,” and an import for Netflix — is absolutely dog-nuts.

 

It’s also a lot of fun.

 

Tae-ho (Song Joong-Ki, left), Jang (Kim Tae-ri, right) and the robot Bubs find something
extremely unusual in their latest haul of space salvage.

Scripters Yoon Seung-min, Yoo-kang Seo-ae and Jo Sung-hee “borrow” from a variety of predecessors — Silent Running, Blade Runner and Elysium immediately come to mind — and overlay those familiar elements with a cheeky original premise. Director Sung-hee Jo’s handling is somewhat chaotic, which befits the rather “messy” future inhabited by a quartet of misfit heroes.

 

The year is 2092. Earth has become an environmental nightmare, with fading sunlight and increasingly acidic soil contributing to the spread of deserts, and the destruction of forests. Thanks to a technological “miracle” orchestrated by the UTS Corp., the wealthy and “connected” enjoy luxurious living in a massive, verdant and enclosed habitat orbiting Earth, reachable via a geosynchronous “space elevator” (long one of my favorite sci-fi concepts, and one that actually might be practical on lower-gravity worlds such as Mars and our Moon).

 

The rest of humanity is stuck on the planet’s poisonous surface.

 

Ah, but all is not lost. UTS head James Sullivan (Richard Armitage) — doctor, physicist, aerospace engineer, historian and the world’s richest and oldest man (at a spry 152) — has ambitious plans to terraform Mars, transforming it into the forested paradise that Earth used to be. 

 

Meanwhile…

 

Thanks to more than a century of orbital development, the region above Earth has become its own nightmare, as satellites fail and other floating debris turns hazardous. This has created a new business model for rag-tag independents, who earn a meager living as orbital garbage collectors: “catching” and then salvaging space junk.

 

It’s a ruthlessly competitive, wholly unregulated industry, and the champs staff a nuts-and-bolts spaceship dubbed Victory. Its four-person crew comprises genius pilot Tae-ho (Song Joong-Ki); the somewhat mysterious, ex-space pirate Capt. Jang (Kim Tae-ri); resourceful and heavily tattooed engineer Tiger Park (Jim Sun-kyu); and a reprogrammed military robot named Bubs (Yoo Hai-jin).

 

The latter is impressively adept with a cable-fed harpoon, which — being a robot — it can hurl while standing atop the Victory’s exterior.