This, Korea’s first-ever space epic, is the latest in the wannabe Hollywood blockbuster craze that has swept Asia. Following in the wake of special effects extravaganzas like the Russian NIGHT WATCH (2004) and the Chinese WANDERING EARTH (2019), SPACE SWEEPERS (SEUNGRIHO) hails from South Korea, a nation that has been looking to challenge Hollywood for the past two decades. South Korean cinema has proven quite popular with film festival audiences but has yet to make the type of mainstream splash that K-pop music has—although, with the enormous international success of PARASITE (2019) and the ascendance of SPACE SWEEPERS, it seems that situation might be changing.
Like NIGHT WATCH and THE WANDERING EARTH, SPACE SWEEPERS features a highly elaborate CGI-packed spectacle in service of an implausible and semi-coherent narrative. That didn’t stop its backers from giving the film a massive promotional push (including a promotional webtoon that premiered on the South Korean web portal Daum in May of 2020). The planned June, 2020 theatrical release, alas, was pushed back due to the spread of Covid-19 in South Korea, as was the second projected release date in August ‘20. Like THE WANDERING EARTH, SPACE SWEEPERS was ultimately snatched up by Netflix, and premiered to enormous viewership (it debuted at number one in over a dozen countries), on February 5, 2021.
The inspiration for the film, according to director Jo Sung-hee (of A WEREWOLF BOY and PHANTOM DETECTIVE), was space junk, i.e. the chunks of human made debris floating around in outer space. Space junk, of course, is a real thing, whereas reality is a word that will never be used in descriptions of SPACE SWEEPERS.
It contains a highly involved premise involving the Earth becoming uninhabitable due to pollution. A portion of humanity has retreated to a space station owned by the UTS Corporation, in preparation for a planned relocation to Mars. The focus is on a crew of so-called Space Sweepers who to make money collect space junk and sell it back to UTS.
These sweepers are a band of criminal mercenaries whose ranks include Bugs, an Iron Giant-esque robot, and Tae-ho, a ruthless soldier whose humanity was stoked by a little girl he found and adopted on a past mission, only to lose her in an accident due (in part) to his own stupidity. The sweepers see a way to strike it rich when they happen upon that most obnoxious of commercial movie conventions: the cute kid, in this case a little girl picked out of a car floating in space. The kid, it seems, is an android named Dorothy, with a bomb inside her that was implanted, apparently, by a terrorist organization.
The Sweepers attempt to ransom Dorothy, only to find that the so-called terrorist organization they’re targeting is not actually terrorist affiliated, and that Dorothy is not actually an android. She, in fact, has awesome powers that are being used by malevolent people looking to destroy the Earth and render Mars the only viable option for human habitation. It’s up to the space sweepers to save Dorothy and the planet.
Boring is something this film isn’t. It contains both foot and spaceship chases, laser shootouts, explosions a’plenty, a great deal of overwrought sentimentality (too much, if you ask me) and a vast multi-ethnic cast (much of it Caucasian) to ensure that every conceivable demographic is covered, with dialogue that’s in English, Chinese, Russian and Korean.
The technical credits are impeccable. The CGI effects, by Dexter Studios (who also worked on THE WANDERING EARTH), are as good as anything turned out by Hollywood, and the same can be said for the music, lighting and editing. The cast for its part is adequate, no more, no less.
All this comes at the expense of coherent storytelling, with the events having a very disconnected feel, and characterization, which ranges from trite-to-nonexistent. The overall impression is of a film that tries way too hard for commercial credibility.
So in summation, this film is slickly mounted and dramatically inert, yet filled with sensation and eye candy. It is, in short, just like the Hollywood fare it strives to emulate. No wonder SPACE SWEEPERS has been so well received.
Vital Statistics
SPACE SWEEPERS (SEUNGRIHO)
Bidangil Pictures/Merry Christmas/Netflix
Director: Sung-hee Jo
Producer: Su-jin Kim
Screenplay: Sung-hee Jo
Editing: Mira Ha, Na-young Nam
Cast: Song Joong-Ki, Kim Tae-ri, Seon-kyu Jin, Hae-Jin Yoo, Richard Armitage, Ye-Rin Park, Mu-Yeol Kim, Ji-Yeol Oh, Hyang-gi Kim, Nas Brown, Kevin Dockry, Daniel Joey Albright, Dae-han Kim, John D. Michaels