I liked it enough, it was a rather unique thing, that is best appreciateed if watched in its original language with subtitles because there’s not just one language but lots of it, because this is sciencefiction in a distopic future and there’s lots of people coexisting and using a universal translator, so everyone in this movie speaks their own language. I heard Korean and English of course and also Spanish and French and a few I didn’t recognize or didn’t notice in the confusion, but Google says they were German, Russian, Chinese, Nigerian Pidgin, and Tagalog spoken in the Philippines, not sure if I’m forgetting something.
No Italian, though :’(
The protagonists are four people in a starship called Victory that go around cleaning space from all the garbage and then selling it for money, but if they break stuff or something they are fined so they’re always in debt.
-The first we meet is Kim Tae-ho who was once a soldier, brought into the UTS Genius program by Sullivan himself. One day he saw a baby and decided to keep it and raised the little thing as his own daughter, and he loved her very much. He called her Su-ni, but having a little girl changed him and he couldn’t shoot and hurt like he did before and was fired. No more nice house, he had to live on the streets of Earth. One day he tried to make money gambling or something and told Su-ni to entertain herself because he was busy or something like that, and she died in a bad space accident that killed many people. He knows that she’s dead but since that day he’s trying to find enough money to pay for a search, for her body to be found, it’s possible inside a three years span until the body will go out of orbit or something.
-Captain Jang leads them; she’s tough and very determined. Jang Hyun-sook, adopted by UTS as a child and raised to be an engineer and very good at it, until she abandoned that colony and started working against them. She’s already attempted once on Sullivan’s life.
-Bubs is some kind of android with a peculilar personality, who wants to gain enough money for a skin operation, he wants a complete body reconstruction to look like a real person.
-Tiger Park is the fourth crerwmember.
Earth is barely livable so the elite and rich live in space, in the residential districts of UTS, founded by James Sullivan, the richest man in the world, who is also 152 years old apparently although it’s not clear to me how can that be, and he sure doesn’t look it. His people call him the Saviour of humanity, but actually 95% of human population is still on Earth, in hell, but he doesn’t care about them. He has his own ideas of creating a better world after a traumatic childhood, he will say that all the people in his heaven are better people, not just the rich, and to prove this point he offers the man who protested about humans condition to have that paradise handed to him and his family if he shoots a man already condemned to death; the man does it and is horrified by it, but he still did it and Sullivan then kills him saying that he’s bad like everyone down there. Sullivan’s new project is Mars.
The ‘black foxes’ is considered a terrorists group, and it’s on the news that they ‘stole’ an android looking like a small innocent child while it’s in fact a very dangerous bomb. The victory finds her hidden in one of the things they salvage, and they’re absolutely terrified when they realised it’s the same child-looking bomb. Dorothy/Kot-nim is her name, and she also has a cell phone that she used to repeatedly call just one person: Kang Hyeo-nu. Even if they believe her a dangerous bomb they think of all the money they could do if they sell it to the Black Foxes constantly searching for her; they arrange a meeting but are attacked by soldiers. Kot-nim makes a dead plant on the ship bloom and grow tomatoes, real ones that nobody has eaten in a long time so Tae-ho can at least sell those.
Park gets rather attached to Kot-nim who calls them uncles and draws pictures of them and basically is just a little girl. When they finally meet with the Red Foxes, Jang has already understood that Kot-nim is a human child because robots don’t poop, which is of course perfect logic, they don’t and never will, unless there’s some weird, disturbed engineer out there. She’s actually Kang Kot-nim, Hyeo-nu’s daughter. He was one of the scientists working with nanobots on the Mars terraforming project. Kot-nim was born with a rare disease that was killing her, so eventually he injected her with the nanobots; she recovered, started walking again and everything, but it didn’t stop there. We all know about nanobots, they started communicating with each other and basically it got was out of control in the best way possible, she can make any dead plant flourish. Because of this she’s Earth’s only hope, but instead Sullivan took her to Mars, and once it was enough to go on without her, every data and those who worked on it got eliminated; Kot-nim escaped before being killed herself, because it’s not that easy with all the nanobots inside her. The only way to kill her is to kill them too, which can only be done at 200million °C, a real powerful bomb. Sullivan’s plan is to make the bomb explode near her, and it will cause fractures on Earth and millions of deaths.
The Black Foxes are actually ambientalists with a very simple, logical question: if it is possible to transform the hostile environment on Mars into a green land, why not Earth? So they ally wiht our crew, to protect Kot-nim. They are all very fond of her now after all.
Kot-nim is very happy to hug her father again, and she tells him how the captain gave her good spicy food, Bubs did her make up, uncle Tiger washed her hair and uncle Tae-ho and her gained 23 dollars.
Unfortunately, once again they are found out and attacked by the Guards, and all the Foxes, Karum and dad are killed.
Tae-ho and the crew save Kot-nim and take her away on their ship, but the situation is not good, it’s very bad indeed when suddenly the ship detects a nanobot infestation, they surround the ship and release it only once it’s safe. She collapses but she’s ok in the end.
They’re on the news now, called members of the terrorists Black Foxes, blaming them for everything that happened when the Guards attacked them.
They are again found by the Guards guided by Sullivan himself, who tells Tae-ho about his plan and then tells him he’ll pay him for Kot-nim. He gives him 4 millions and Tae-ho takes the money, that he’ll share with his crew and use his part to find Su-ni’s body. He’s lived the last three years for this.
Sullivan tells him that that’s the price of Kot-nim’s life and that Tae-ho will never be a good man.
In case there was anyone who had not yet figured out Sullivan’s personality, we see him appear to the people in the residential area as a gigantic hologram where they can look at him as if in the sky, while he shows them the new Mars.
The crew does not want Sullivan’s money; Park is set on going to rescue Kot-nim, whatever the cost. The captain agrees but she also knows about Su-ni so she tells him to go do what he has to do and that they’ll do the same. He does, he gives the office all his part of the money, 400.000, and sits to wait, looking at Su-ni’s stuff and the last words she wrote the day she died, when he was so ‘busy’ that didn’t even look at it, and cries reading how she wrote that she loved him and wanted to be as good as him.
Tae-ho comes back to join the others and pilot the ship,and the fights begins. Missiles are launched at them: Bubs walks out on top of the ship and takes out as many as he can with his harpoon, and they reach the sphere with the bomb and Kot-nim.
Proble is: Jang looks at it and tells them the bomb cannot be disabled,and Kot-nim can only survive the explosion if she’s 5 million or 5000 km away from it (well, the subtitles first said 5 million and later on said 5000, so one or the other; the monitor will read 5132 but it doesn’t say what, so I’m still not 100% sure). So they agree on a plan and take her away.
There’s a tough battle with one Guard that I think is a machine but Tiger Park manages to kill it/her. No, if it’s warm it must be a human hand…
98 war drones head towards them so they call for help. They tell all the other sweepers of what is going to happen so that they can escape or fight.
Pierre, the French guy in love with Jang comes right away, ready to do anything to help her. The other sweepers also fight the drones.
A shocking audio reaches the news, from the space sweepers, and it’s what Sullivan told Tae-ho, so that everybody can hear it. At least every resident seems to be in shock.
Sullivan reaches the Victory himself, to get his hands on Kot-nim. The crew does everything they can and they finally reach enough distance. They sort of say their goodbyes: Tae-ho sas he was happy with them, Bubs that he loves them and Park thanks them for everything.
This was the best plan, of course. Had they taken Kot-nim away they would have saved only her - if that- but by taking away the bomb they also save a billion lives on Earth, it’s certainly something they’re ready to die for. So they took the bomb away and left Kot-nim behind, to be taken in by Pierre who was rushing to help Jang in any possible way.
As soon as the monitor tells them that they’re far enough, they let the bomb explode killing Sullivan. Both Kot-nim and the Earth are safe, and everybody thinks the Victory is gone until a huge mass of indestructible nanobots brings it back. They’re for sure the ones that ‘infested’ the ship before saving it, and maybe they evolved into soemthing that the bomb could not destroy… I guess… does that mean that Kot-nim would not have died?
Anyway, it changes nothing because this way they saved Earth.
Bubs has been cut in half and the captain gets hold of the top part. The others are ok.
Now that everyone knows the Truth, UTS without Sullivan promises to do much more to help Earth, and the Sweepers that saved it are promised by Uts that they’ll pay them back for whatever loss they had, so Bubs gets a new shining body of a girl with perfect skin, although he still has his voice for now.
Kot-nim now lives with them and they’re a family. From time to time she goes on Earth to ‘make trees’ , the Captain stopped drinking, Bubs is a real girl, Tiger deleted all this tattooes so he will not scare away her friends and Tae-ho bought ten pairs of shoes since he never had shoes before (he even sold his boots in his search for Su-ni, checking on every body that was found).
The movie ends with Bubs reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Life and Songs. She’s serious about educating herself, it seems, and since she doesn’t need papers that prove it to others she also does not need a school to educate herself. Good.
Song Joong-ki is Tae-ho
Kim Tae-ri is Captain Jang
Richard Armitage is James Sullivan
Park Ye-rin is Kot-nim also called Dorothy
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