This was a really fun movie, though I preferred the first half, which felt like
Cowboy Bebop, to the second half, which felt like a very well-done but incredibly over-the-top ’80s action movie. Some of the story choices were so melodramatic as to be utterly ridiculous, like the scale of the threat behind Sullivan’s plan and the larger-than-life, Sullivan-connected backstories these working-stiff protagonists were suddenly revealed to have midway through. They kind of pulled me out of what was otherwise a very entertaining story.
But the second half was still pretty good, and it had some standout moments. I loved the bit with Bubs harpoon-hopping between the drones, animated with a spindly limberness that evoked Lupin the Third. That was a lot more fresh and interesting than just the umpteenth sci-fi movie sequence of spaceships firing blobs of light at each other and swooping through cluttered industrial obstacle courses. And the big shocking twist at the climactic moment was really well-done and left my jaw on the floor.
Though don’t get me started on the scientific inanities like “krypton waves” and a “Lagrangian” debris swarm that’s just minutes away from Earth orbit instead of the same distance as the Sun. Or the whole “nanobots are magic” thing, but that’s pretty commonplace in sci-fi.
I love the way languages were handled, this marvelously polyglot culture where everyone has a translator in their ear and they all speak their own languages. I particularly like that the translators even handled the English creole that Karum spoke, treating it as a valid dialect in its own right along with all the other languages. I've seen people talking about watching the English dub, and I think that's a terrible waste. The multilingual culture is a wonderful bit of worldbuilding texture, and a lot of the characters are speaking English anyway. And there are parts where language differences are specifically mentioned, like when the characters are surprised to learn that “Dorothy” speaks Korean after haltingly trying to address her in English, or the part where Tae-ho addresses his contact in Spanish but then they finally figure out he’s Korean, and when they meet, they tell him just to speak Korean from then on. Does the English dub even acknowledge those lines?
I did notice an odd continuity error — in the scene where the dance club was attacked, the crew were calling out “Kot-nim!” trying to find the kid, even though she didn’t tell them that was her real name until the next scene. I wondered if the scenes were reversed in order in editing, but I don’t see how they could be, since the latter scene had them discussing the aftermath of the former scene.
Is anyone familiar with Korean transliteration? It seemed to me that the names “Kot-nim” and “Bubs” in the subtitles didn’t quite match what the actors were actually saying. The former sounded more like “Got-nimu” and the later like maybe “Bubu” or “Puppu” or something. I’m curious what the exact phonetics actually were.
I was left with the impression of 'live action Manga'.
Since it's Korean, it would be
manhwa.
