Jupiter Ascending

Synopsis: Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) discovers she’s the genetic reincarnation of space royalty and as happens with aristocracy, the family are out to get her... 

I thought that I was walking into this film with my eyes open. Originally slated to be released last year, it was delayed “to polish the visual effects”. Less generous people suggested that it was probably being dumped. I had low expectations but I’d seen a lot of concept art released and it was gorgeous. So, I thought, it might be awful but at least it’ll be pretty. Unfortunately, the choppy editing ruins any chance of appreciating the prettiness and the script ruins the chance of appreciating anything else.

Oh dear lord this is a bad film. Bad isn’t always a bad thing, bad can be fun. Last week I went over to my mate Dave’s and we watched Starcrash, a legendarily bad film. It was awesome. It’s awful, but a delicious kind of awful. The problem with Jupiter Ascending is that it’s serious when it should be fun. Comic moments fall flat because they’re the payoff to serious moments that you didn’t care about. There’s a great joke (you’ve seen it in the trailers) that’s meant to be Jupiter attempting to awkwardly seduce her protector Kane (Channing Tatum), but it falls flat because they have no chemistry and the preceding scenes didn’t establish any sense of intimacy. Or character, or anything else. There’s still plenty of laughs to be had, but they’re of the kind where you laugh at the film without any sense of affection for it. You laugh because you can’t believe people actually wrote a script this bad and thought they could get away with it.

The marketing for the film is sort of honest. It says “From the makers of The Matrix Trilogy”. What it doesn’t mention is that its second and third instalments were nonsensical messes. But since those misfires they’ve given us Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas, both wonderful films that never got the love they deserved at the box office. But now they’re back to misfire and even their ability to stage compelling action wrecked by shaky-cam blurriness.

Jupiter Ascending is not all bad. The wealth of ideas on display is something worth appreciating, even if the ability to weave them all into something coherent consistently evades the Wachowskis. The costuming is gorgeous too. And there’s a strange Brazil -inspired sequence right in the middle as Jupiter moves through a nightmare bureaucracy to obtain the various certificates to establish her bona fides. Tonally, it’s completely out of place with the rest of the film, but it ends with a cameo by Terry Gilliam, which is kind of awesome. There’s enough there that I wish someone else had written the script. Someone interested in character, plot and audience engagement. I really wanted to enjoy this on some level, but much the same way Jupiter seems to spend half the film falling through the air, I find myself clutching at nothing.

The basic story is of a human thrust into a bizarre and confusing universe. The film does a good job of foisting that same experience on the viewer. It’s disjointed, sometimes illogical and frequently nonsensical.

 

 

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