Elon Musk Is the Ultimate Villain in the Korean Sci-Fi Film Space Sweepers – TheStranger.com

"I'm hiding from an Elon Musk-like character..." Netflix

The character, a white man named James Sullivan (Richard Armitage), is the CEO of a corporation, UTS, that controls suburbs that orbit the earth. The company has big plans to relocate all of humanity to Mars, which it privately owns. UTS corporation dwarfs Tesla, the future-oriented company owned by the South African-born Elon Musk, the richest man on our earth until mid-Februaryhe goes back and forth with Jeff Bezos for this title.

Directed by Jo Sung-hee, Space Sweepers is set in 2092, maintains a fast pace, includes plot twists and turns that are not always easy to track, features lots of explosions, lots of robots, and that raw examination of capitalist class structures we have come to expect from the best of South Korea's directors (The Housemaid, Piet, Train to Busan, Parasite, and so on).

Indeed, the space sweepers in Space Sweepers are basically space janitors. (Incidentally, according to Wikipedia, the show should really be called Space Victory, as that's the literal translation of the film's Korean title, Seungriho.) The janitors are in the risky business of cleaning the space junk that swirls around earth. They are clearly essential workers, but they are paid peanuts.

And so, on one side we have these broke janitors (mostly POCsAsians, Africans, South Asians), and on the other we have a white CEO, who looks to be in his late 40s but who is, in fact, 152-years-old. The rich die hard.

Aditya Mani Jha of Mint Lounge has this to say about it:

But there is one big difference between Musk and Sullivan. Musk wants humans to move to earth because of a solar catastrophe that will happen millions (if not billions) of years from now. The distance between us and that catastrophe is unlikely to get anyone excited about living on another world with another sky, another sun, another year. Sullivan knows this is the key problem in his commercial plans for the Red Planet. Most humans would just prefer stay on earth. The solution to the obstacle? It cannot be said without a SPOILER ALERT.

To get into the mood of what Sullivan has in mind for earthlings who do not want to become totally privatized Martians, let's read one of the best passages in W. G. Sebald's 1998 book The Rings of Saturn:

Can you feel that? If so, then you will easily see what Sullivan has in store for the only living planet in our solar system. By destroying earth's livability, he can force humans to colonize Mars on the terms of a contract. The problem with earth is that everyone (humans, other animals, and also plants) has a right to it, can still lay claim to it, is still attached to the billions of years that formed its biosphere. The contract can only go so far, earthlings. But the mad dream of capitalism has been the creation of a zone that is much like what Dubai is for foreign workers. A zone where citizenship is replaced by the contract.

This is how Daniel Brook describes the guest-worker system in Dubai in his book, A History of Future Cities:

But there is still worker unrest in Dubai, because Dubai is still on earth, the planet that is shared by every living thing. Mars, on the other hand, can be owned by the CEO who makes it livable. And those who are forced to call it home owe everything to the corporation that bankrolled its livability.

Elon Musk will eventually stop this talk about the sun burning the earth to a crisp in an unimaginably distant future and start siding with Sullivan's view of the Mars colonization problem: The essence of earth is irredeemably anti-capitalist.

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Elon Musk Is the Ultimate Villain in the Korean Sci-Fi Film Space Sweepers - TheStranger.com