Never Be Bored
21 March 2021
Space Dust
Space Sweepers, 2021 Jo Sung-hee film. Typeset in the Future book and essays by Dave Addey; The Mandalorian tv show; Scott Listfield art.
If you're looking for a fun sci-fi action movie, give Space Sweepers, on Netflix, a try. This Korean movie follows the crew of the Victory, a junk collector ship, as they try and make some money gathering tons of the space trash in orbit around a dying Earth. Meanwhile, the CEO of a company building bubble ecosystems—paradise in space, for only the very wealthy, of course—plans to expansions to Mars. A news broadcast warns the public of a bomb called "Dorothy" that looks like a young child.
I think the Netflix trailer makes it seem like a more serious and dramatic movie than it is, so maybe don't watch it first and just go into Space Sweepers with an open mind. Really it's a wonderful way to spend a Friday night, with some takeout on the sofa. If you like sassy androids, found family stories, and beautiful CGI, this one's for you.
Small, adorable being, possibly dangerous, hunted for money, is found by badass fighters with sad backstories, who immediately go "baby!" and adopt it as their own. This is a description for both Space Sweepers and The Mandalorian, streaming on Disney+. If you like space operas, you may like this Star Wars spinoff show about a stoic bounty hunter who finds a tiny child and, somewhat against his better judgement, decides to keep it. (If you've never seen Star Wars, no worries, you don't really have to know anything about the films to keep up with this tv series.)
One of my favorite tropes in sci-fi is when a character speaks in one language, and another responds in a different one, and they both understand each other because they have fancy translator headsets or whatever. In Space Sweepers, characters speak Korean, Arabic, Spanish, French, English at each other, and it all just flows—implying a multicultural setting where nearly anyone can speak and be understood. Another way language can be used in sci-fi worldbuilding is through text design—in Typeset in the Future, a series of essays also adapted into a book, Dave Addey explores how using the right typography in movies helps create the setting (short-cut tip, if you want your title cards to look futuristic, just write them in Eurostile).
In Space Sweepers, we don't get to see much of Earth, which is undergoing a climate crisis and becoming unfit for habitation. But if we had, maybe it would have looked something like the beautiful artwork of Scott Listfield, who paints astronauts exploring the ruins of today's world—a broken McDonald's sign half buried in sand, a rusted and tireless car abandoned in the desert, statues covered in graffiti.