Space Stagecoach

 

“Space Stagecoach”

A Review of Space Sweepers by Nick Olszyk

 

Distribution Service: Netflix

Year: 2021

MPAA Rating, TV-MA

USCCB Rating, NR

Reel Rating, Three Reels           

 

            Disclaimer: The following review contains spoilers.

 

            It’s nearly impossible to create a work of literature that is totally original. What is also difficult,, but wonderous if successful is to use motifs and tropes from other works and remix them in a compelling manner. Space Sweepers is such a film that employs a wide variety of genres and themes to create the most entertaining film I have seen this year, although it’s still only February.

            By the year 2092, Earth has reached catastrophic levels of pollution, so the multi-national government/corporation UTC has created habitable biodomes in space and is currently terraforming Mars. A good portion of humanity lives in these stations just outside Earth’s atmosphere. Kim Tae-ho (Song Joong-ki), Tiger Park (Jin Seon-kyu), and Bubs (Yoo Hai-jin) are scavengers who search the skies for valuable trash under the leadership of Captain Jang (Kim Tae-ri) aboard her ironically named ship Victory. While salvaging a runaway vessel, they discover Dorothy (Park Ye-rin), an android designed to mimic a six-year-old girl that also happens to be the universe’s most deadly weapon. The scavengers – debt ridden and relatively amoral – agree to sell it to a terrorist organization for two million dollars rather than return it to UTC. In the process of the deal, they discover the mechanical marvel is far more valuable than anyone anticipated.

            Dorothy the planet-ending-robot is a cover for a darker truth. She is a real human child named Kot-kim who can miraculously control the trillions of UTC nanobots they use for construction with her mind. Once they discover she is human, Tae-ho and his companions cannot simply sell her off. Humans, especially children, are not objects for profit. Even in an age where human life is less valued every year, literature still understands that a single human is worth saving. Here, Space Sweepers borrow heavily from great Westerns like The Searchers and True Grit, where an outlaw must guard a child from deadly predators. The team is willing to sacrifice their own lives to save Kot-kim. The only reason Tae-ho wanted the money in the first place was to recover the body of his own daughter, who died in a space accident three years prior.

            Another common sci-fi motif the film employs is the myth of absolute social progress. UTC may seem benevolent for providing a haven for people wanting to leave Earth, but it ruled by the ruthless technocrat James Sullivan (Richard Armitage) who selects only the wealthy and “morally pure” to inhabit his paradises. He employs his vast armies to kill Kot-kim, who poses the only threat to his goal of destroying Earth and restarting humanity on Mars in his own image. Sullivan speaks of the jargon of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk who believe humanity can be saved through technological progress and scientific conformity. They seemed to forget that this was tried several times in the last century with disastrous results.

            As a foil to Sullivan’s gilded master race, the crew of the Victory represents, in the words of Pope Francis, “those on the margins.” Each member has a tragic backstory that forced them into a life of sanitation management. There is a constant hodgepodge of different languages switching between Korean, Russian, French, and Chinese without warning. Sullivan’s communities are all English Caucasians. Lately, I have become troubled with the rise of anti-white sentiment in films, but this is a more symbolic gesture as there are many people of European descent among the Victory’s colleagues. This also harkens back to the “ship of fools” device used in classics like Stagecoach, where a motley crew of ragamuffins must come together for a common cause.

            All of this is done some of the best art direction and special effects in ten years. Even apart from the story, Space Sweepers is an operatic odyssey filled with delights for the eyes and ears. There are some minor flaws, but, overall, it’s hard to ask for a better cinematic start to 2021.