The year is 2092, the CEO of the UTS company, James Sullivan (Richard Armitage), is creating a controversial alternative human habitation on planet Mars. Meanwhile, the planet Earth is a polluted mess along with the space around it, now littered with debris of broken-down satellites and spacecraft. International space junk collector crafts compete against each other to get the best pieces of scrap metal to sell to earn dollars for survival.

The Victory was one such craft, with a rag-tag all-Korean crew composed of Capt. Jung (Kim Tae-ri), Tiger Park (Jin Seon-kyu), the robot Bubs (Yoo Hae-jin), and their pilot Kim Tae-ho (Song Joong-ki). The child Dorothy (Park Ye-rin) a.k.a. Kot-nim, wanted by authorities for being an android bomb, found her way onto their ship. In their efforts to keep Kot-nim safe from capture, they discovered a sense of noble heroism they never knew they had.

From the first action sequence of several spaceships going after a piece of space junk, we immediately see and hear the ambitious scope of this South Korean film in terms of high-tech science fiction special effects and the multilingual international cast (even some Filipino!). Honestly though, I did not exactly find it easy to get into its groove. There was so much going on and so many characters, the story was not clearly established until after the first hour.

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Like many previous hit Korean films like "Miracle in Cell No. 7" or "Train to Busan," there was also a cute adorable child character here to serve as the emotional center amid the violence and the chaos going on around. Korean filmmakers know how a child in peril can bring out the humanity in even the most jaded adults in the most topsy-turvy of situations. They went for this familiar trope once again here as main course, peppered with fart jokes aplenty.

I think this film was more of a showcase of the state-of-the-art visual effects in Korean cinema than anything else. It was proof positive that they can now match Hollywood in creating the cinematic illusion of adventures set in outer space for the big screen.

Even with all that audacity in the setting and scope of the story, the use of items like paper money and pastel crayons, unlikely to exist anymore by 2092, betray some lack of imagination.

This review was originally published in the author's blog, "Fred Said."

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