Friday’s Rag Tag Crew meets Hugo BDP: Space Sweepers (no spoilers)

Space ship crews don’t come more rag-tag than this. Each and every one of them has a dark and tragic backstory but now they cruise Earth’s orbit salvaging junk as dramatically as possible.

It’s the near(ish) future and Earth is sliding into an ecologically uninhabitable mess. Luckily there are new opportunities in space but those are mainly for the very wealthy. Elsewhere in orbit, a multinational lower class scrapes by on rundown habitats and in clunky space ships, making a living out of what is orbiting the planet.

The junk-salvaging ship Victory has a Korean crew consisting of a former child-genius turned pirate (Captain Jang), a former drug-dealing gangster (Tiger Park), and an ex-corporate soldier (Kim Tae-ho) who gave up being a soldier to look after his daughter, who was later killed in an accident in orbit. He works only to get enough money to pay to have her body found. The fourth crew member is Bubs, a former military android who s scraping together the funds to get a more human-like body.

One of the neat innovations in the film is most people wear a translator. This enables the broader cast not just to be international but actually speak whatever their actual language is. It’s a neat plot device but it feels like a very natural and plausible view of the future. The core cast is Korean, so much of the dialogue is Korean but the sinister head of the UTS corporation Sullivan speaks in English and among the many other ships and crews salvaging junk there are a plethora of languages.

The plot, rather than the general worldbuilding, kicks in when the crew rescue what appears to be a little girl called Dorothy from some space debris. Is she what she seems or is she a valuable weapon of mass destruction and if so, how much money can they get for her?

From there the story spirals out into chases and conspiracies while the crew of the Victory deal not only with their pasts but their dubious ethics and desire for money versus doing what is good and protecting Dorothy.

I won’t spoil the plot but there are actually few surprises. It’s a near-future cyber-punkish story of corporate greed and little people fighting back. The baddies are bad and the goodies are ethically compromised by their past, which is just how we like things to be. They are, of course, also fantastically good at fighting and flying their ship and their deeply repressed sense of truth and goodness wins out in the end.

What will make you love this is the film just has a tremendous heart. It’s packing in way too much backstory for the key characters for a one-off movie but it takes that just a little bit beyond the point of absurdity to the point where it is almost a celebration of the trope. The multinational nature of Earth’s orbiting community is very nicely realised and while the show isn’t really aiming at realism, it is easy to get immersed in the setting.

You all know I like robots and Bubs is a brilliant addition. Again, the sassy robot crew member is a bit of a cliche but Bubs has a lot more depth to their character.

Fun near-future orbital space adventure. High on my ballot.