Sarcastic robots. A crew of desperate spacers aboard a spaceship. Pitched space battles. Some very nice scenery. All of those things are present in a new trailer (h/t Bleeding Cool) for a new Korean space opera film called Space Sweepers, which looks like it’ll be a whole lot of fun to watch.
Set in the year 2092, Earth is in ruins, and crews of salvagers fight amongst themselves to try squeeze out as much money as they can from the scraps. There’s the pilot (Song Joong-Ki), the captain (Kim Tae-Ri), the Engineer (Jin Seon-Kyu), and their weapons robot (Yoo Hae-Jin). It’s a hard life, and the crew has been down on their luck.
The crew comes across an abandoned ship and opens it up, only to find what appears to be a small girl. But it’s not a girl — it’s a deadly android that doubles as a bomb. While some of the crew want to sell the android, their captain forbids it. Judging from the rest of the trailer, it looks like their rivals are thinking the same thing. There’s gunfights, hand-t0-hand fights, space battles, lots of things blowing up, spaceships, and quite a bit more. The entire think looks like an exuberant mashup of Guardians of the Galaxy, Firefly and last year’s The Wandering Earth. It’s the type of film that you just need buckets of popcorn for as you sit down and take in the excitement.
The film is slated to come out on September 23rd in Korea. Hopefully, some distributor will pick up the film for a release here in the United States at some point in the near future.
There’s always Netflix…
Yup, I want.
OMG that looks outstanding
Something set in space doesn’t make it a space opera. This looks fun, but not operatic. Operatic would be melodramatic, focused on justice or morality plots, with the background of a universe out of moral balance that needs to be righted. Epic fantasy would be the fantasy equivalent. But you can have all that melodrama in a simple, present day, mundane Earth setting too.
This looks more like a space adventure — chase the McGuffin. It has more in common with the Fast & the Furious than Star Wars. I definitely want to see it.
I’ll watch anything with Kim Tae-ri in it.
That’s a Traveller Campaign in local space. I WANT IT NOW!!!!! :D
@@.-@. I’d characterize it more as space western; the characters aren’t wealthy Officers concerned with weighty moral philosophy and civilized laws, they’re just fringe-dwellers doing whatever they have to to keep food on the table. “The people history steps on,” as Joss Whedon so poetically put it.
And don’t forget Quark (no, not that Quark).
I’m always up for a good sarcastic robot movie :-)
Cool. It looks like fun.
@@.-@ The term Space Opera is meant to be a derisive description of a certain type of SF that is basically a Soap Opera in space. It’s meant to delineate less “worthy” stories about people in SF settings from what we now call Hard SF which focuses more on the science and technology itself and it’s impact on our lives.
The term has little to do with traditional “Opera”, epic melodrama or morality tales like Wagner’s Ring Cycle or Tosca. Although there are many SF films that could be made into “operas” such as The Fountain, Solaris, Moon, Gattaca etc, these are definitely not “Space Opera”.
Rule of thumb is that if they use Hyperspace to quickly move the plot along to get from Star A to Star B, then it’s usually Space Opera (Star Wars, Dune, BSG). If the plot itself is about how exactly do we get from Star A to Star B then it’s probably Hard SF (2001, The Martian, Interstellar).
This Korean movie, as others have pointed out, is superficially Firefly mixed with GOTG. It’s 100% Space Opera. And it looks pretty cool.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Want!
I like that it even says they’re not out to save the world.
Looks a bit like Planetes, which isn’t a bad thing.
That looks fun! I’d watch it if it was subbed.