Space Sweepers looks gorgeous... and that's about it

Impeccable visual effects don't suffice to hold up a paper-thin drama

This movie lost me before I was five minutes in. Our protagonist, Kim Tae-ho, has boarded the space elevator to his job as an orbital debris retriever, and when the trip takes him out of Earth's atmosphere, we see a floating pen. It's just... there, for no reason.

"Did you see that? Get it? GET IT?" the movie seems to scream in your face. Yes, we saw 2001. Yes, we recognize the cultural significance of the floating pen. But in 2001, the floating pen was used to illustrate a key theme of the story. In Space Sweepers, it's a gesture devoid of context, a cheap tug at the strings of nostalgia. And it's a physical impossibility in a vehicle undergoing acceleration. There is zero reason for that scene to contain a floating pen other than to wink at the audience, and that little instant breaks any trust we could have in the movie's sincerity.

And that's before it starts throwing Wall-E, Firefly, Elysium, Cowboy Bebop and Gattaca into a blender.

The plot takes a while to start, but eventually we follow Tae-ho in his quest to hide a thermonuclear bomb, which he and his crewmates found by chance, until they can sell it to a terrorist group because they wouldn't make any money by giving it to the authorities. His money problems are made very clear to the audience, multiple times, to the point of melodrama, and we know he can't just report the bomb because this government's untrustworthiness is on the comical side of Kafka.

Also, the bomb is a sentient robot in the shape of an adorable little girl that his crewmates are growing fond of.

With these elements, a movie could very well work. But we have to wait until almost the end of the first hour before we get any idea of who these characters are, and then it's given to us in a heavy montage of exposition. Suddenly, we're in a different movie. From a breakneck comedy of errors we're yanked into an intimate drama that wants to be social commentary. It turns out that Tae-ho had an adopted daughter, and he feels guilty for her death, and of course the robot girl reminds him of her, and just in case we've forgotten, the government is evil. But the emotional beats are too calculated, the manipulation of the audience too obvious. Once the sad flashback has done its job, we immediately return to the slapstick, and it's impossible to take this movie seriously anymore.

On the antagonist's side, the sloppy writing is even more painful. James Sullivan ("doctor, physicist, aerospace engineer, historian," "wealthiest man in the world" and, seriously, "savior of humanity") is a walking pile of evil CEO clichés taken to the cartoonish extreme. His scenes are bloated with exposition that alludes to more interesting events in the background than the ones we're watching, and the only enjoyable part about them is the actor's sincere effort to sell the nonsense he's saying (in mandatory evil British accent). In one scene, he monologues about how people's DNA reveals their moral character (which, for the record, is completely false), and he manages to deliver the whole of it with a straight face. That's being a professional.

For a movie that tries so hard to look realistic, this sort of bad science is everywhere. At the end of that early scene with the floating pen, the space elevator turns on its "artificial gravity," which, OK, we might pretend is a thing that exists in the future, except that the vehicle was already accelerating and thus should have its own gravity. Later, a search expedition for a victim in an orbiting debris zone, which normally takes days to prepare, is shortened to a five-minute launch when a larger payment is made, which is simply not how scarcity works, or logistics, or bureaucracy, or anything. But the worst instance of the movie failing to understand basic facts is the following line:

"Krypton waves have the ability to defuse nanobots..."

No point trying to decipher what this character is saying.

"... and are only emitted during the detonation of a hydrogen bomb."

 Now he's just making sounds.

"All of that is irrelevant to our presentation."

But it needed to be said anyway, because it will matter later, so to make sure we'll remember it, the movie puts it at the most incongruous moment.

A more meticulous direction could have repaired some of the missteps in the script. What we got instead is a beautiful-looking tonal mess where the wrong choice of execution was made every time. When the movie aims for serious, it's corny; when it aims for funny, it's ridiculous; when it aims for relevant, it's insufferably preachy.

But let's be charitable. Is there a meaning to this story? It seems like it's attempting to make a metaphor about how inequality forces people to treat each other as fungible assets, how desperation can twist human beings into accepting a price for the parts of life that should be invaluable. The robot girl is, after all, an intelligent lifeform, yet our protagonists have no problem with the plan to sell her, because they're so desperately broke that she's their only chance to make ends meet. But the circumstances that push them into such a choice are transparently contrived. Despite the fully integrated character of this pluriethnic society, there's a legal structure with separate civil rights for citizens versus non-citizens that is left unexplained. We're told the villain wants to enforce genetic segregation, but he does it by looking at moral choices, which he, as a doctor, should know are not genetic, and which he forces on his victims anyway. As a piece of criticism of technocracy, this doesn't work. Viewers hungry for a nuanced working-class perspective on near-space garbage retrieval are advised to watch the infinitely better Planetes.

Even without searching for a theme, it's hard to find any element in this movie's plot that makes sense. The action in the first half is driven by a sequence of misunderstandings and near-misses that is only possible because the heroes and the nameless minions alternate randomly between omnicompetent and hopelessly incapable. And there's a supposedly surprising revelation about the robot girl that should be obvious to anyone who saw her sneeze in the trailer. It's soon followed by still another revelation about her, but it's made of more bad science.

From that point on, the plot turns into a standard movie pursuit: good guys run, bad guy wants something good guys have. Then comes the reversal: bad guy seems to win, good guys fight to recover what's theirs from bad guy. As third-act movie chases go, this one is well done, filled with excitement, if sometimes over the top (the ending has the most shameless copy of the Death Star I've seen since Austin Powers), but its causal logic is tied to a secret evil plan so absurdly out of proportion with the antagonist's motivation (and so unnecessary given his resources) that the viewer has no option but to stop thinking and, I don't know, gape at how pretty space looks.

That's where Space Sweepers excels: in the art department. The shots that show us the nearly uninhabitable Earth are a gut punch, while every scene with the robot Bubs is a delight to watch. The rich bad guy's office has an appropriately menacing design, and the areas where the common people work and live feel genuinely crowded, chaotic, alive. Outer space is vast without being confusing, and spaceships wear all their scratches. The final battle is visually flawless. This oppresive version of the future appears believable on the screen, right until the moment someone speaks a line.

This movie is a world-class spectacle, impressive on a technical level, but it lacks something to say. It just looks cool for the sake of looking cool. There's certainly an audience for that content, but even some of them may get bored. We know South Korean science fiction has good writers; match them with a production budget of this size, and the results will be fantastic. Space Sweepers doesn't rise above OK.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10 still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore.

Bonuses: +2 for the quality of visual effects, +1 for building a seamlessly multilingual future, +1 for a touching portrayal of the experience of gender transition.

Penalties: −2 because the lines in Spanish are so badly mispronounced that they ruin the world's believability, −1 because the technobabble doesn't even pretend to make sense, −1 for an utterly laughable villain, speaking of whom, −2 for the harmful trope of Evil Disfigurement.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10 not very good.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Nerds on Tour: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Ana Lily Amirpour, dir. (2014, film)

Dossier: A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT

Location: Iran (Persia)

Package Type: Film

Itinerary: Here in Bad City, there's a ditch where the town dumps its dead. That should tell you a lot about Bad City. Arash lives in Bad City, but he's a good dude. In a city full of drug dealers and worse, Arash works hard, and has worked for years to save up in order to buy a classic car. His pride and joy.

Arash also takes care of his widower father, who is addicted to heroin. It feels like a pain-pills-gave-way-to-worse situation. But Arash's father, Hossein, is nevertheless in deep to a drug dealer, who takes Arash's car as partial payment. This dealer guy sucks a lot. So none of us feel too bad when he picks up an innocent-looking Girl, tries to convince her to become a prostitute, but instead she grows fangs and murders the dealer for his blood. Not a huge loss, and when Arash comes by to try to get his car back and finds the dealer dead and mutilated, it's the easiest thing in the world to take his money, and his unsold drugs, and dump his body in the ditch where these things go.

Turns out, Arash isn't a great drug dealer! He tries to offload some of his stuff at the club, but a pretty girl instead convinces him to ingest some of it himself. So Arash gets blitzed. Stumbling around, lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood, dressed in a Dracula costume, Arash comes upon The Girl. An actual vampire. He assures her that he is not to be feared. It's only a costume. He is harmless and charming, so she takes him home.

That's where things get more complicated, and where they begin to unravel.

Travel Log: Let the Right One In is the character-driven, off-the-beaten-path vampire movie par excellence, and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night owes a lot to that earlier, Swedish film. While the plot points and age-ranges differ, the vibe is decidedly similar. 

 

And in a low-budget film with only a small number of characters, it must be said, it's pretty easy to predict the ways in which these few characters might intersect. That doesn't take away, however, from the charm of this film. 

 

For a movie where people have their limbs bitten off, bodies are routinely dumped in ravines, and drug addicts are used as prey, it's a super-charming adventure! Throughout, the audience knows more than the characters, so one of the most interesting balancing acts the movie pulls off is the shifting of perspective between Arash and The Girl. The ways in which they come to see each other, and to interpret one another, are the areas in which this movie really shines.

 

It was a little disappointing to learn that, though the film was written and directed by Iranian-American filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour and billed as "the first Iranian vampire movie," it was actually shot in California. It's set in a fictitious Iranian city, though, and the actors all speak Persian. The Iranian life it depicts is one of nightclubs, music, drugs, prostitution, and wealth disparity. It's probably a vision of Iran that many Westerners wouldn't expect, and a depiction that would make it dangerous, if not impossible, to actually shoot the movie in Iran. Hence, the California stand-in. Walking into this sphere of decadent nightlife, wearing a traditional chador covering, The Girl presents as something very different from what she really is. She looks like a modest, possibly devout individual, when in fact she is the most powerful — and depending on your definition, unholy — being in the film. It's a clever redirect that plays on cultural codes and expectations. 

 

Also, it must be noted that the movie has an all-time great movie cat, and the black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous.  

Analytics

The Adventure: 4/5
The Scenery: 4/5.
NerdTrip 8/10

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather since 2012, fan of vampire movies since the local channel showed that blue-tinted print of Dracula one Halloween, lo these many years ago.

Microreview [film]: Ponyo by Miyazaki Hayao

Innocent child's tale, or meditation on the afterlife?

Miyazaki Hayao is the Lord of Animation, one who has had as wide a cultural impact as Walt Disney himself. His movies feature strong male and female characters, interesting storylines, stunning visuals, and fascinating technologies in ways unrivaled by any other modern animator. But that does not mean that all of his movies are created equal. Miyazaki has made the finest animated works of all time in My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. On the other hand, he’s made some comparative duds (like Howl’s Moving Castle or The Wind Rises, both of which are not bad movies by any stretch of the imagination). I have already talked about some of my favorite Miyazaki movies on Nerds of a Feather. Today, I’d like to introduce the movie I am more conflicted about: Ponyo.

WARNING: The following discussion is spoilerific!

Ponyo tells an innocent love story between a fish-girl, Ponyo (or “Brunhilde” as her father refers to her), and a five-year-old boy, Sōsuke. Sōsuke finds Ponyo trapped in a glass jar on a beach. He frees her from the jar, only to cut himself in the process. In thanks, Ponyo licks his hand, healing his wound and initiating changes that allow her to transform into human shape. Thus begins a friendship, or a pure love story as told through the eyes of a child. Ponyo decides that she wants to become human, and the rest of the movie revolves around the adventures she takes with Sōsuke to make her wish a reality.

The most impressive aspect of this movie is its animation. The art is visually arresting. In fact, Ponyo features perhaps the most gorgeous artistry of any Studio Ghibli movie. Roger Ebert stated this perhaps better than I can in his own review of Ponyo:

"The film opens with a spellbinding, wordless sequence beneath the sea, showing floating jellyfish and scampering bottom-dwellers. The pastels of this scene make Ponyo one of the very rare movies where I want to sit in the front row, to drown in it. This is more than 'artistry.' It is art."

   

Still, in all honesty, I did not like Ponyo much the first time I saw it. The storyline appeared somewhat childish, the narrative and dialogue left important questions unanswered, and the characters acted in head-scratchingly strange ways. Take Sōsuke’s mother. She’s the epitome of a strong woman, one who has little problems taking care of herself, her family, and the community while her husband is away at sea. But whether driving through a tsunami or leaving her five-year-old son at home alone for no apparent reason, she continually chooses to put herself and her child at risk. Every driving scene is particularly cringe-worthy. 

But having a two-year old at home gave me the chance for a second take… then a third… and a fourth… and a fifth… I’m now at least thirty times in. Watching a movie this many times (granted, my attention now wanders more than I care to admit) has given me a different take. I now see quite clearly that Ponyo is much more nuanced and creative than I had originally thought. In addition to being a cute story that is safe for children, it seems likely that Ponyo is Miyazaki’s subtle and veiled meditation on death as he advanced in age.

Take Ponyo's given name, Brunhilde. Some have suggested that Ponyo is a deliberate incantation of the valkyrie Brynhildr, someone who served in some Germanic myths as a harbinger of death. Ponyo herself serves in a similar capacity, bringing a tsunami that wipes out the majority of Sōsuke's village, even reaching the lighthouse where Sōsuke resides. In the wake of that tsunami, Ponyo and Sōsuke may in fact bear witness the passing souls of the now-decimated community. As the two adventurers ride in a toy boat in search of Sōsuke's mother, they run into the whole town in small boats paddling toward the hotel on "the other side." Was this not a reference to crossing the Sanzu River, the Buddhist equivalent to the River Styx? Moreover, later in the film, Ponyo and Sōsuke approach a tunnel that Ponyo obviously does not want to enter. Going into it causes her to revert to her fish form and to fall asleep. Was this tunnel one that leads to the afterlife? Finally some of the people they meet on the other side act in ways that suggest they might no longer be alive (the grannies, for instance!).

I remain conflicted about Ponyo, even after my thirtieth take. On the one hand, it is a cute and innocent story of love shared between two five-year-old children. In this context, it is a great family movie and something my own two-year-old son can watch over and over and over again. On a much deeper and implicit level, however, it may also be Miyazaki's extended musings about life, death, and the promise of what's to come...

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +2 for the meticulous, hand-drawn artistry, which remains so much better than the current trend toward CGI.

Penalties: -1 for leaving so many questions unanswered; -1 for Sōsuke's mom and her death wish.

Multiple Views Bonus: +1 for making me think so much more deeply about this film than I had ever intended.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 "An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws"

The Six Weirdest Post-Apocalyptic Movies New(ish) to Netflix Instant Streaming

Casting around for something good to watch on Netflix Instant, but can't decide between two equally horrible-sounding choices? Here are my mini-reviews of six of Netflix's stranger offerings--the good, the bad, and the poopy! If even these mini-reviews are too long, skip to the Too Long, Didn't Read one-word summations at the end!

Goodbye World (2013): More like 'goodbye 100 minutes I'll never get back.' A bunch of charisma-less, infuriatingly annoying eggheads happen to be vacationing in a solar-powered, well-stocked cottage when The End of Civilization comes. Pretty much all the couples' relationships unravel, or I should say finish unraveling, before they so much as meet their first serious challenge. It's a movie about shockingly unlikeable characters who do nothing but talk talk talk--that and make shockingly selfish decisions. It's enough to make one start to wish they'd all get hit by a meteor or something...

TLDR: Yuck.

Day Watch (2006): It's not really new to Netflix, nor is it a post-apocalyptic movie so much as a sort of 'ongoing threat of looming apocalypse' movie, but that's good enough for Nerd work! This sequel to Timur Bekmambetov's 2004 Night Watch, itself a pretty entertaining ride, felt far superior to that maiden effort. The comic touch, as well as the romance of regret (the all-important quest to unmake the critical Bad Mistake that started the whole mess in the first place), are finely done, and everything from the dialogue (or its subtitles, in any case) to the character development feel more convincing here than in Night Watch.

TLDR: отлично! ('excellent')

Kill Zombie! (2011): a spirited Dutch attempt to capture the magic of Shaun of the Dead, it's amusing enough, and it's got some interesting comic twists, but overall it feels very derivative, and—to put it kindly—the lead actor is hardly of Simon Pegg caliber (or "calibre" for all you zany British spellers out there!).

TLDR: Middelmatig ('Meh').

After the Dark (2013): What a weird, irritatingly inconsistent movie! It's got plenty of eye candy in the lush visuals of nuclear apocalypse and so forth, and the thought experiment of visualizing a thought experiment,if you will,  was interesting, but it's thoroughly sunk by a stupid love triangle angle and a leading lady utterly lacking in charisma. Plus, why Indonesia? And who made a bunch of entitled expatriates the masters of the universe, anyway? If someone told me, "Quick! You can only save ten people from among these twenty snotty whiners...who will it be?", the choice would be easy—I'd save none of them. I'd rather spend a year utterly alone than have to endure any one of them, especially in the feel-good hippie version.

TLDR: Argh!

It's a Disaster (2012): It's anything but! David Cross has never been funnier, including in Arrested Development, and the ending is to die for, as is the delicious uncertainty that the apocalypse has come at all! Structurally, it's very similar to Goodbye World (see above), but it keeps the relational dysfunction at the center of the comedy rather than trying to be all serious about something as potentially hilarious as The End. Overall, It's a Disaster is one of the funniest movies, bar none, I've seen in a good long while.

TLDR: Hilarious!

Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead (2011): Wow. Just...wow. A major bummer. This movie is doubtless a dream come true for all you lovers of toilet humor, poop, and generally bum-centered humor/horror. For the rest of us...

TLDR: 糞 ('Crap')

Next up: Bounty Killer (2013), a post-corpapocalypse movie about which I've heard good-ish things (though the stupid poster gives me pause). In fact, I think I'll go watch it right now...

TLDR: Unknown! 

This has been a public service announcement of what's loopy and what's poopy in Netflix Instant streaming's rather uneven selection of post-apocalyptic movies, brought to you by Zhaoyun, sf/f lover and crap-hater here at Nerds of a Feather since 2013.