Movie Review: Jupiter Ascending

Lana and Andy Wachowski’s new film Jupiter Ascending follows their emerging pattern of reaching for a broad, sweeping vision of the future. Like the Wachowski’s Cloud Atlas and The Matrix before it, the movie seeks to blow our minds both visually and thematically. However, like Icarus and his winged hubris, the Wachowski’s trend set by their earlier successes comes crashing down with Jupiter Ascending, proving the age-old adage that, if you fly too high, you’re bound to get burned. And, as Jupiter Ascending unfolds tragically on the big screen, we’re reminded of another potent maxim: the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

At the outset of the film, we get a flash of narrow-focus humanity that gives the opposite impression of how the movie is going to progress. Mila Kunis, starring as the titular character of the movie, tells the story of her and her family’s humble beginnings. In her story, she recounts how her father (an avid cosmologist whose apparent love for his telescope is quite possibly the most convincingly acted emotion in the entire movie) met her mother on a cold Russian night, leading to a marriage and a stupidly named child. Of course, this would be a bland story with no meaning if her father didn’t die due to inexplicable causes right after, so he does and then never comes back up again. Flashing forward to the present, we see Kunis stuck in her mediocre life as a normal, Russian-American housekeeper who just wants all the things normal people want: wealth, recognition, a break from the nagging of her vaguely Eastern European family and a $4,000 brass telescope.

Fortunately for her sympathetic and relatable viewers, Caine Wise, a prophetically named half-albino, half-wolf, space bounty hunter played by Channing Tatum, soon appears as if an angel from on high. Gun ablaze and shirt precariously close to being lost at all points, he rescues Kunis from her life of absurd mediocrity. Tatum’s appearance catapults Kunis into a world outside our own world that she, and most of Jupiter Ascending’s viewers, cannot begin to comprehend. As events unfold, Kunis finds that she, with Tatum’s help, is responsible for the fate of the earth, a realization that forces her to look beyond her own self-interest and her family––all while navigating the dangers and intrigue of a galaxy that is uncaring for the weak and hostile to newcomers. Along the way, she meets a variety of characters representing the morals, interests and structures of galactic society. Among these personalities are Sean Bean’s character Stinger Apini, a gruff and conflicted warrior whose struggles to choose between morality and orders show the hierarchy in the galaxy’s civilization. The beguiling Abrasax siblings, played by Eddie Redmayne, Douglas Booth and Tuppence Middleton, also show the dangers of unchecked capitalism and greed on the broadest possible scale.

This repeated conflict between society’s opposite pulls to do what’s right and what’s profitable is clearly supposed to be the unifying theme of Jupiter Ascending, and the Wachowskis try admirably to unify this idea with the plot of the movie. Unfortunately, the film falls into the predictable trap of pushing the story forward with CGI explosions instead of dialogue or plot. Ironically, the visual effects are objectively the best part about the movie. The Wachowskis create a bright and colorful depiction of the world, using dramatic color contrasts and striking vistas to create a visual chiaroscuro. However, the excess of lasers and dramatic changes in camera angle detract from the beautiful backgrounds rather than adding to them, ending altogether too frequently in a confusing blur from which victorious combatants emerge seemingly arbitrarily.

This fault in editing also detracts from the considerable acting abilities of the actors and actresses in Jupiter Ascending. The star-studded cast gives the movie incredible potential, but there is a total lack of delivery. A huge portion of the dialogue is absurd and unbelievable, leading to such exchanges as Tatum telling Kunis, “I have more in common with a dog than I have with you”, to which Kunis replies in a voice full of romance and lust, “I love dogs.” Even when the conversations between characters aren’t this ridiculous, they are often cut with almost comical abruptness, leaving viewers confused about scene changes even as the closing phrases of the dialogue are spoken. This choppy editing prevents any sort of flow from being built, and we have to listen to the music to get any sort of idea of what we’re supposed to feel for the characters on the screen at any given point. As if this didn’t make the movie hard enough to understand, there are also a vast number of characters we are expected to follow. Jupiter Ascending hardly goes five minutes without bringing in some new, wacky personality, many of whom only get one or two shots on screen and seem to only exist to say a few lines of the script that would make even less sense if they were spoken by an established character.

Despite everything else, the contrast between the travesty of its script and the elegant simplicity of the idea behind Jupiter Ascending is what makes the movie such a tragedy to me. I’m a huge sci-fi nerd, and I particularly love when movies take conflicts from our own society or history and blow them up onto a more dramatic, action-packed and exciting stage. Jupiter Ascending attempts to do exactly this by critiquing the dangers of greed and capitalism and the conflict between obeying orders and following universal morals. The intent is all here, and the Wachowskis certainly are aware of all the necessary elements to craft the narrative, but the way that the final product comes together is so disjointed, sloppy and unpolished that Jupiter Ascending ends up being worse off than if it had been a simple blockbuster action movie. I am particularly disappointed by this. I really wanted to like Jupiter Ascending, and I really wanted the idea to pan out. In the end, the film has more to offer as an unintentional comedy than it does as a science fiction movie.