Set in the year 2092, pollution and trash on Earth have made the planet nearly uninhabitable. Citizens flee to space where a megacorporation called UTS has built a new home for humanity, but not everyone can enter. Citizens of the Eden live in prosperity while non-citizens live in poverty on the outskirts.
If you think that sounds like Wall-E or Elysium, you’re not wrong. Some of the early shots of Earth in the film closely resemble that landscape, and space existing as an escape plan for a battered Earth is not an uncommon idea. Nevertheless, despite the problem facing the average human being a familiar one, the chemistry between characters turns out to be the most memorable quality.
The spaceship called victory has four crew members: Tae-ho, Captain Jang, Robot Bubs, and Tiger Park. Tae-ho (Song Joong-ki) is an ex government operative who was banished from Eden after orphaning a baby girl and then raising her as his daughter. She later died in a terrible accident, but Tae-ho was unable to recover her body due to lack of funds.
Captain Jang (Kim Tae-ri) led a team of pirates on a failed mission to assassinate the CEO of UTS Corporation, James Sullivan (Richard Armitage). She was the only survivor of the failed mission.
Tiger Park (Jin Seon-kyu) was a drug kingpin on Earth who fled to space to escape a death sentence.
Robot Bubs (Yoo Hae-jin) is a former military robot who now saves money for gender confirmation surgery.
The crew competes with other ships to recycle space junk for money, but what’s especially interesting is the multicultural component director Jo Sung-hee adds to the ether here. All crews speak their own language, but translators make it easy for them all to communicate and banter at each other. Towards the end of the film, their initial competitive relationship would become unified, but we’ll keep the spoilers to a minimum.
The Victory crew stumbles upon a young girl, initially thought to be a nuclear weapon, but as the crew becomes more comfortable with her, the truth about the girl and UTS is revealed. We see the characters grow more dynamic as unlikely factions band together to fight a common enemy and save billions from certain destruction.
