#her strength seems practically superhuman so it's possible she's also been given a nanobot treatment

[cinnamonsikwate]

just rewatched space sweepers (2021) on netflix and realized something which i don't think is ever actually addressed in text & am not sure if it was supposed to be obvious (bc it didn't even occur to me until now) but - spoilers ahead! -

are james sullivan's occasional body horror episodes a result of a nanobot treatment gone wrong/gone right? like it may be what's keeping him alive well beyond typical human life expectancy, but it's also putting him through excruciating pain. bc we see the veins on his face receding as the hydrogen bomb goes off, and we know that the heat output from an h-bomb explosion is the only thing that can kill nanobots (except the langrangian ones apparently), so.....?? is the reason why sullivan showed up out of nowhere at the last minute bc he was already supposed to be there, trying to get away from the bomb as well?

anyway. the film's been out over a year but i don't remember seeing anything about this particular aspect before. would be pretty interesting if it's actually canon!

also. i hate sullivan's backstory and the bizarre anti-semitic implications; it puts a v significant dampener on an otherwise good film (aside from tiger park's dreads jfc). my proposal for an alternate backstory (developed with my sib) goes:

push back the timeline. make it the 2100s or 2200s. doesn't really matter

following this, sullivan would have been born some time in the first half of the 2000s

instead of a war orphan who turns to eugenics (bruh???), he's instead born into privilege and his dad is basically elon musk. uts corp starts out as basically spacex

keep the nanobots bit! they're injected into him at some point - to cure a sickness, just for the hell of it, whatever. whether or not his dad has a hand in it depends on how heavy-handedly we want to draw the parallels with kot-nim and *her* dad. in any case, seeing how kot-nim's nanobots protect and help her, unlike his, will fuck sullivan up and contribute to why he so badly wants to destroy her after he's done exploiting her

this sullivan is a man obsessed with legacies (and not the "purity" of the human soul holy shit). he struggles at first to uphold his father's legacy. when he surpasses it by building eden, it's a slippery slope. now he wants to leave *his* own mark as flashily as possible, collecting orphans (including tae-ho and captain jang) & "raising" them in his own twisted version of parenthood to be "geniuses"

i think captain jang should have been more sullivan's protégé than tae-ho, which could also explain why she's more reluctant to "parent" kot-nim bc she doesn't know what a healthy parent-child relationship is supposed to look like. would have also given more weight to the revelation that she's tried to kill him multiple times. i like to think tae-ho had a mentor he was close to in the space guard - the closest thing he had to a parent, maybe the one who actually found him first before sullivan literally carried him in his arms to uts. maybe they died just before the mission where he found su-ni, and that's partly why he decided to save her

this film has everything - anti-capitalism, the juxtaposition of blood ties with found family, breaking cycles of abuse, nanobots!

this is A Lot of backstory though - which is why i wish space sweepers had been a tv series instead, so we could also have gotten more on everyone else. in any case, it's still a p good film with a lot of heart and great rewatch value! two hours just fly by!

#space sweepers #i was going through the tag yday & i'm glad we all agree that bubs is the breakout star of the film #you know i think they were trying to Do Something with the whole nature of humanity thing bc this is a space opera w/o aliens #but it was kind of uhhhhhhhhhhhhh #maybe don't do this #ss james sullivan #ss captain jang #ss kim tae-ho #ss kang kot-nim #what's camila's deal? is a question i had since she first appeared and i think #it's possible that since tae-ho left the uts went a little nuts trying to ensure loyalty #her strength seems practically superhuman so it's possible she's also been given a nanobot treatment #they just love those little buggers #tae-ho most likely knew her from his time in the sg so like. what is their relationship? rivals? friends? #was she always Like That or did the nanobots mess w her brain & her personality like the sw clones' chips #space sweepers honestly deserves the number of spinoffs pacrim got #long post #sorry! #calemonsito notes