- Directed by Sung-hee Jo
- Written by Sung-hee Jo
- Stars Song Joong-ki, Kim Tae-ri, Jin Seon-kyu
- Run Time: 2 Hours, 16 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1WYnJF1Pwo
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It’s a big, epic space adventure. Full of action, humor and violence. Don’t overthink the science or the physics. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Synopsis
In 2092, the Earth is a dying mess, so the UTS Corporation has built an orbiting home for humanity. Only a chosen few can ascend to the utopia.
Tae-Ho goes to the lost and found and trades his gravity boots. He looks at a dead child in a drawer— one of the bodies found in orbit. It isn’t who he’s looking for. He then hops on a space elevator and goes up.
James Sullivan is 152 years old, the oldest living man, and the founder of UTS. He looks like a man in his 40s. He’s been working on establishing a Mars colony. They discuss all the space debris that is in orbit causing trouble.
There are ships devoted to cleaning up the space debris. The Victory is one of these, and we quickly get to meet the crew. Captain Hang is in charge, Tiger Park is the engineer, and there’s a quirky robot, Tae-ho is at the helm. They compete with other ships for the rich prizes.
They head to the UTS waste management satellite. Tae-ho needs to make more cash to keep funding his search for her. There’s a news report about a missing android that looks like a child but is really a devastating weapon of mass destruction.
They go out to examine the last piece of space wreckage they salvaged and find a child inside one of the storage compartments. It’s not just any child, it’s Dorothy, the android from the TV report. She reminds Tae-ho of his missing little girl.
They’re all terrified of the nuclear bomb-child, and she chases them around the ship. She’s just playing, but they’re afraid of her. She’s more than just a bomb; she brings a dead tree back to life. Tae-ho thinks they can sell the child instead of simply returning her to the police. They call the phone she had with her, and the voice on the other end offers two million. They don’t know it, but the voice on the other end is Sullivan. We see that Sullivan has some kind of strange medical condition.
They go to make the trade, but Dorothy wanders off in the middle of the transaction. There’s a battle, but our guys get away with the child. Unfortunately, the bank impounds their ship.
The robot tells Dorothy the story of Tae-Ho’s child, Su-Ni. It destroyed his career in the military. He eventually lost her when the space station was hit by debris. He couldn’t afford the search and rescue service, so he’s still looking for her out there.
The guys soon figure out that Dorothy isn’t a robot; she’s human. Dorothy had a terminal illness, until Dr. Kang injected her with nanobots. The nanobots started talking to other nanobots outside her body. That’s how she revived the dead tree. Maybe she can bring life back to Earth. Sullivan wants to make her disappear. Because the nanobots inside her are so tough, the process of killing Dorothy will pretty much kill what’s left of Earth and the population still living there. As well as most of the workers in orbit. Just the utopia will remain, ready to rebuild on Mars where Sullivan will be a king.
There’s another bunch of robot-goons that come for Dorothy, but the Victory launches and gets away thanks to Dorothy’s nanobots. Once again, they try to get Dorothy back to Dr. Kang. They hand over the girl but soon notice that it’s a trap: an EMP disables the ship. Soldiers break in and kill Kang and his team, but leave the Victory crew and Dorothy alive.
Sullivan struts in to brag. He admits to the plan they had guessed at anyway. He offers Tae-ho Four million for Dorothy. He orders his people to make them watch the death of Earth before they finally execute them.
Tae-ho takes his money to go find his daughter, but Captain Hang and Tiger are going to try to rescue Dorothy. He has a change of heart and goes with them. This leads to another space battle.
They fly inside The Factory, which has a huge bomb at the center. When the bomb goes off, Dorothy will be killed and The Factory will crash into the Earth, destroying it. They find Dorothy without much issue, but they need to stop the bomb.
Jang discovers that the bomb is unstoppable. Maybe they can fly Dorothy away fast enough that the explosion shock wave won’t hurt her nanobots. If her nanobots go, the illness that was killing her will come back. Tiger Park does battle with a cyborg and adds another hand to his collection.
They call the people on The Factory and in orbit and tell them what’s up. They all come to fight. They transmit Sullivan’s gloating to everyone, including the utopia people who are horrified at the plan they weren’t aware of. So he’s pretty much finished. But wait, Sullivan’s in the little fighter ship right behind them.
It was all a trick; they sent Dorothy with Pierre, and they took the bomb with them. It detonates, killing the crew of the Victory and Sullivan. The Factory, Earth, and Dorothy are all fine.
No, wait— there were nanobots that saved the Victory. The good guys are all fine. Dorothy and her magic nanobots let Tae-ho talk to Su-Ni one last time. Now they’re all one big happy family of space junk collectors.
Commentary
The scenes with spaceships and space stations look great. Actually, all the visuals and sets are excellent. This is really good-looking. We watched the dubbed version, and the conversations get a little hard to follow in places, but it’s doable.
It’s clearly heavily influenced by Cowboy Bebop. The four main characters from Bebop map onto the crew of the Victory perfectly (not counting the robot). It’s like they wanted to do that story but couldn’t get the rights, so they did this instead with a lot of the same ideas. It’s got a lot of juvenile slapstick humor, but also some really seriously violent scenes as well, so it’s not a kids film.
There’s a lot of world building and backstory here, almost as if this was developed from some existing universe, say a manga or something, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
It’s a fun movie, but you don’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about it. There’s Earth-sized plot holes here. The deus-ex machina at the end really devalues the whole thing.Still, it’s really well done and looks fantastic. It might be a little violent for kids, but otherwise, I did like it.