Review: Jupiter Ascending

Wow. Just wow. I
don’t think I’ve ever seen so much money ploughed into something
quite so ridiculous in my entire life. It managed to make Flash
Gordon look clever, to make Adaptation look coherent, to make Men in
Black look deep.

Let me just sum up
the plot for a second. Mila Kunis plays a woman who cleans toilets
for a living. She hates her life until aliens try to kill her while
donating eggs in a fertility clinic. Fortunately, she is rescued by
an alien werewolf space ranger with anti-gravity roller skates.
Seriously, I am not making this up.

I enjoyed it. I
wouldn’t watch it again, but I enjoyed it in the way I enjoy watching
crappy B movies and poorly made sci-fi with rubber headed aliens. At
it’s core, the problem with Jupiter rising is that it doesn’t know
what it is. It mixes political intrigue with space opera with family
drama with fantasy escapism with Gilliamesque comedy steampunk and as
a result has no time to develop any of these. I could tell there was
a problem three minutes into the film. As an audience, we need to be
informed how to watch a film. Are we expecting whimsy, gritty
realism, fantasy, comedy? The first three minutes of Jupiter rising
set up a gentle, philosophical romance: Jupiter’s parents meeting in
Russia, bonding over his love of astronomy, gently teasing each other
about his desire to name their child after a planet. Then a bunch of
gangsters break into their apartment and he is shot. No build up, no
hint that this sort of thing happens in their neighourhood, no
explanation as to why they might have been targeted. The mood whips
from soft focus and romantic lighting to hard hitting drama, then
suddenly we are in Chicago, and Jupiter and her mother are working as
cleaners, may also be illegal immigrants, and the mood switches to
downbeat urban slice of life.

Given this confusion
of genre, its no surprise that the plot is equally confused, the
antagonists and protagonists difficult to distinguish, and the
characters impossible to root for. By the time we hit full on sci fi
mode – an attempt to cross Dune and Star Wars which simply came
across as actors playing dress up – I found myself not really caring
what happened to any of them. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the
Wachowski siblings had a big box of movie cliches and were pulling
them out of a hat one after another and challenging the other to
write them.

I could go on at
length as to why this movie didn’t work. Instead, I should devote
some time to what did work. The acting was good, the cast impressive.
Eddie Redmayne made the most of what he had, Sean Bean was the most
Yorkshire alien around, and Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum gave good
action scenes, even if the love interest bit seemed a little forced.

If you’ve got
nothing better to do, or are drunk enough to not care about plot, I’d
say give the movie a go. It’s got explosions, and pretty visuals, and
you can play buzzword bingo everytime they use a phrase that makes a
scientist in a lab somewhere cringe (I particular enjoyed ‘genetic
reincarnation’).

But don’t expect it
to be good, snappy, or clever. For that I recommend Flash Gordon.