“With Earth no longer habitable, the only place left to go was up.”

Justin’s rating: What’s Cowboy Bebop and Firefly?

Justin’s review: Hey kids, who’s up for an epic space western — from South Korea? That’s not a question I thought I’d be asking, but I’m delighted to be doing so even still. It’s great to see imaginative filmmaking emerge across the globe, especially as modern Hollywood grows so stale.

In Space Sweepers, the earth is “breathing on life support” in 2092, so humanity’s been moving up into artificial worlds and space stations in orbit owned by the UTS corporation. It’s here in this crowded orbit that hard-working crews of “space sweepers” prowl for dangerous and profitable junk. Think of them as futuristic cowboys, lassoing unruly cattle and trying to stay one step ahead of the competition.

The most unstable and risky of these are the crew of the Victory, who work well together but are hanging by a thread above endless debt. The captain’s a hard-drinking psycho, the engineer’s got anger issues, the ex-soldier pilot’s struggling with poverty and the loss of his daughter, and the robot… well, I won’t lie, the robot’s awesome. She’s maybe the best character of the film, all chatty and quirky and saving up for a skin graft to look human.

During one salvage run, the Victory crew discover a little girl named Dorothy who’s hidden amid a ship. Actually, she’s not a child, she’s an android. Actually, she’s not an android, she’s a weapon of mass destruction that both UTS and a terrorist organization called Black Foxes want to claim. And while the crew initially isn’t crazy about living with a potential walking hydrogen bomb, they all start warming up to Dorothy.

So we’ve got factions trying to get their hands on Dorothy and our heroes attempting to stay one step ahead of everyone and complete poverty. At the core of this film is a ship full of people latching onto this kid as a path back to respectability and morality. They haven’t had something good to fight for, and now they do, and that brings out the mama bears and papa bears in all of them. And that’s a good thing, because they’ll be fighting to save earth itself before all is said and done.

It’s just too bad that what they’re fighting is some speechifying evil CEO who hogs screen time and is boring for all of it. The anti-capitalist themes of this movie are as subtle as a cartoon roadrunner slamming a mallet on your head, and it is tiresome.

Space Sweepers is a gratifying scifi adventure even so, loaded with a ton of eye candy, a core of likable characters, and a heavy splash of silliness. I appreciate that it doesn’t take itself completely seriously — just check out an early scene where a brawl between the three humans on Victory result in a three-way KO. Also, pretty much everything with Bubs the robot is king.

And sure, nothing here is original — no doubt playing it as safe as possible for the high stakes of its budget — but its hodge-podge inspirations are repackaged in a pleasing way. As long as you’re OK with a lot of dubbing and homages to every space movie in the past 40 years, Space Sweepers is a prime candidate for a decent, geeky time.

Intermission!

• Cool space elevator!
• “My, such dirty mouths. Don’t you have an imagination?”
• Don’t play cards against a robot
• Is she going to sneeze or explode?
• “He’s not scary, dear, he’s just poor, desperate, and mean.”
• The nanny bot looks like it gives great hugs
• That’s a whooooole lot of makeup
• “See? Now that is an order.”
• The Black Foxes love their UV tattoos
• All the soldiers shooting at the ship is a cool moment
• Nanobot infestation is not good
• “Who farted?” “You. You little fart machine.”
• Evil Space Guard lady’s got those killer eyes
• He got his hand after all
• OK at this point they’re all the X-Wings going against the actual Death Star