66. Space Sweepers (Seungriho); movie review

 

 

SPACE SWEEPERS (SEUNGRIHO)

Cert 15

137 mins

BBFC advice: Contains strong language

What do you get when you combine Elysium and Blade Runner and chuck in a bit of Star Wars? With heroes who are all from South Korea?

Yep, Space Sweepers is a right old mish-mash but, as someone who is not usually into sci-fi, I was surprised at how engaged I was by it.

Jo Sung-hee's film is set in 2092 when the earth is on the verge of collapse and the wealthy are making for a new world on Mars as well as homes which are orbiting the dying earth.

Meanwhile, space is becoming clogged up with junk so there are teams of sweepers trying to eke a living.

One such crew are on The Victory - a bunch of misfits who have different backstories but are all pulled together when they discover a humanoid child robot (Park Ye-rin) who is believed to be a weapon of mass destruction.

Initially, Space Sweepers is a tad difficult to follow but soon becomes a pretty clear stand-off between the crew and the villainous head (Richard Armitage) of the corporation which has set up the space refuges.

Song Joong-ki plays the former head of the space guard who has a deep grievance with the aforementioned bad guy after his daughter was sucked into space during a catastrophic incident.

He has been searching for her ever since and has now teamed up with a leading rebel (Kim Tae-ri), a former drug lord (Jin Seon-kyu) and a defected military robot (Yoo Hae-jin).

Character exploration is woven into a script which has plenty of high-intensity space battle scenes and a fair few shoot-outs between robots and our heroes.

But there is time for both pathos and humour (there is even an ongoing fart joke).

Indeed, the longer it went on, the more I drifted out of my comfort zone and into The Victory's quadrant.

Perhaps it was the way the hard edge of the crew was melted by defending the cute little girl or perhaps I just needed a movie which required immersion and no brainpower.

Reasons to watch: Quirky sci-fi

Reasons to avoid: Will be too off-the-wall for some

Laughs: None

Jumps: None

Vomit: None

Nudity: None

Overall rating: 7/10

Did you know?  In 2015, NASA published its strategy for human exploration and sustained human presence on Mars. The first stage is the "Earth Reliant" phase using the International Space Station until 2024; validating deep space technologies and studying the effects of long-duration space missions on the human body.

The final word. Joong-ki Song: “I heard that it was No. 1 in 26 countries, and I wondered, ‘Are they talking about our movie?’ I’ve also been contacted by a lot of people I know. I saw a photo of a family who’d gone to a camping site and were watching ‘Space Sweepers’ together, and seeing that kind of photo makes me really happy.” Soompi

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