Jupiter Ascending

Director: Andy & Lana Wachowski
Screenplay: Andy & Lana Wachowski
Stars: Mila Kunis (Jupiter Jones), Channing Tatum (Caine Wise), Sean Bean (Stinger Apini), Eddie Redmayne (Balem Abrasax), Douglas Booth (Titus Abrasax), Tuppence Middleton (Kalique Abrasax), Nikki Amuka-Bird (Diomika Tsing), Christina Cole (Gemma Chatterjee), Nicholas A. Newman (Nesh), Ramon Tikaram (Phylo Percadium), Ariyon Bakare (Greeghan), Maria Doyle Kennedy (Aleksa), Frog Stone (Aunt Nino)
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Year of Release: 2015
Country: U.S.
Jupiter Ascending
Jupiter AscendingMuch like Disney’s John Carter (2012), Andy and Lana Wachowski’s Jupiter Ascending is a willful throwback to the early-20th-century era of pulp science fiction, when fantastical magazines with bold illustrated covers printed outlandish stories about interplanetary travel, strange alien civilizations, and amazing technologies. And, like John Carter, it has been an unmitigated disaster, crashing like an errant spacecraft at the U.S. box office and earning the ire of the critical establishment (it has done better in foreign markets, although given its hefty $175 million price tag, it is far from breaking even). The Wachowskis should have known better.

With the exception of the Star Wars franchise, over the past several decades the science fiction genre has been successful at the U.S. box office in only two flavors: comic book superhero stories and hard sci-fi that fetishizes weapons and technology. The big hits—the Transformers franchise, The Avengers (2012), Avatar (2009), and Independence Day (1996), to name a few—have all fallen squarely into one of these categories, while the bombs have tried to mix science fiction and fantasy in the way the old pulp stories used to do, mixing elements of fairy tales and myth (royal families, important lineages, wars between competing races, etc.) with spaceships, laser guns, and the like (the aforementioned John Carter is the best example, although we could also mention 2000’s Battlefield Earth, Disney’s 2002 animated film Treasure Planet, and 1984’s Dune). For whatever reason, audiences today just don’t like that mix. Fantasy is big business—see Peter Jackson’s gargantuan Lord of the Rings and Hobbit franchises, not to mention the Harry Potter films—but only when it stands on its own. The Wachowskis, perhaps looking to shake things up again after the disappointing response to their fascinating and ambitious Cloud Atlas (2012), went where so many others have failed, with predicable results.

It doesn’t help, of course, that Jupiter Ascending is not a particularly good movie, although it is not nearly as bad as some critics have made it out to be. Mila Kunis stars as the titular Jupiter Jones, an earthbound cleaning lady who discovers that she is actually the genetic heir to a squabbling alien dynasty. She finds herself in the crossfire of three siblings—Balem (Eddie Redmayne), Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), and Titus (Douglas Booth)—each of whom is jockeying for the inheritance of their recently deceased matriarch. She is protected by Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), an ex-soldier who skates through the air on anti-gravity boots, and Stinger Apini (Sean Bean), one of Caine’s former military comrades. Caine is a unique creation, having been genetically engineered by mixing human and canine DNA, which means that he looks primarily like, well, Channing Tatum, except for his doglike ears (that unfortunately look more like elf ears) and tendency to get a little too wolfish when enraged.

There is more, of course, much, much more, which is part of the film’s problem. The Wachowskis try to pack as much as possible into the film’s two-hour running time, making it feel narratively leaden even as it herks and jerks from plot point to plot point, whisking us across the solar system to various planets and saddling oddly named characters with tons of exposition. It’s the kind of stuff that one can imagine working on the page in 1950, but its visual incarnation via CGI and elaborate production design results in overload (the cinematography by Oscar winner John Toll is generally gorgeous, though).That overload is balanced out (but not in a good way) by Jupiter, who is a rather bland protagonist; Mila Kunis has never been the deepest or most expressive of actors, as if too much emoting might compromise her cute girl-next-door pout, which makes her a not particularly engaging heroine. Caine doesn’t fare much better, and his ex-military rebelliousness and matching blonde spiky hair and goatee make him an almost embarrassing sop to the skater demographic. The inevitable romance between Jupiter and Caine has no real heat as the actors have no on-screen chemistry, so we’re left with a whole lot of old-fashioned plot to muddle through (which was one of the criticisms of the Wachowskis’ two Matrix sequels) without anything or anyone to hold onto. They acquit themselves well in the action sequences, which have zip and panache, but that’s not terribly surprising, and it’s certainly not enough to distract us from the rest of the film’s ponderousness.

It’s not surprising that audiences have stayed away, which is actually a shame since Jupiter Ascending, at the very least, represents a bold filmmaking team’s attempt to create original material, and its failure will only reinforce Hollywood’s assumption that audiences want nothing more than reheated comic book heroes and adaptations of young adult adventure novels. The Wachowskis themselves, despite forever cementing themselves in pop culture lore with the game-changer that was The Matrix (1999), have nevertheless failed again to connect with audiences, which suggests that they are living too much inside their own heads. It will be interesting to see what they manage to do next, but I doubt any major studios will be lining up to supply them with $100-million budgets.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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Overall Rating: (2)




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