Letter #14: Space Sweepers

Good afternoon, Erin.
 
I’ve done the most terrible thing, for which I’m sure you will never forgive me: I watched the movie Space Sweepers instead of finishing True Beauty.
 
I know. I know. But I couldn’t help it. Vincenzo and Hee-do? There wasn’t an option. I had to.
 
…er, that is, Netflix for—um, forced me to! With…brain-altering, uh, waves! Yes—they used waves to alter my brain and forced me to watch a lackluster sci-fi movie! This isn’t my fault! It’s a…a…a conspiracy! Yeah yeah yeah, a conspiracy! Like, they knew I loved Cowboy bebop, right, and then they spent a bajillion dollars to buy the rights to and film a Cowboy Bebop live-action TV series—just like we all dreamed would happen—and then they made it the worst possible thing they could, planting the desire in my head to consume a good live-action version of Cowboy Bebop and—again, by force!—slowly building that desire into desperation with small bursts of brain-altering waves they’d deploy every 23 minutes during all of my Netflix binges. Oh, the brilliant wickedness of it all! This…this is all totally their fault. Definitely, um, definitely not anything to do with me maybe having developed a very slight need to blast Kim Tae-ri into my eyeballs as much as possible.
 
Just…so we’re clear.
 
Also, don’t watch Space Sweepers, if you’ve not done so already. It’s…it’s not great.
 
I mean, there’s a little girl in a beach hat, which you know I’m a fan of, but it wasn’t all that floppy, so it didn’t make up for nearly as much as you would hope.
 
There are some good concepts, in fairness, if not always treated with the thoughtfulness to make them work out as best as they could. (For example, they do some stuff with languages and translator devices that is clever but also seems to contradict itself, over the course of the movie. But it’s also always fun to hear non-English speakers speak English without the proper intonations, so…on balance, it’s fine.) But one thing they absolutely get right is setting up everything that plays out by the end. They’re not all payoffs for those setups, but everything appears to be established early in the movie and then brought back or built on top of later on. So, in that sense, some decent in-world consistency. And well done, them.
 
That said, it’s slow and over-ambitious for its runtime (I wouldn’t be surprised to hear this was originally intended to be a show or mini-series), the characters are given backgrounds but not real personalities, the music sounds a little too much like knockoff Avengers tracks, there wasn’t nearly enough Kim Tae-ri, (which, again, is definitely not the entire and lone reason I jumped on watching this movie when I saw it pop up), and, of course, no Hyundais—the absolute gall.
 
So…yeah. No bueno.
 
I’ll finish off True Beauty maybe tonight—if I can stomach dealing with the TWO YEAR TIME JUMP they hit us with at the end of Ep 14. Which, just…why do they do this?
 
Anyway. Think about your next recommendation. It’s almost time.
 
--Daryl




 
 
PS – Admittedly, a lot of me watching this movie was just wanting to have a letter to give you because I really, really wanted to try out the envelope flap drawing concept I came up with to see how it would look. And…it’s, um, not quite what I saw in my head. But, still, I used A LOT of my black pencil to do it, so…it’s definitely the not wanting to let the pencil use go to waste, not at all anything about Kim Tae-ri. Nope. Pencil.

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