Movie Review: Jupiter Ascending

Jupiter Ascending (2015)


A young woman discovers her destiny as an heiress of intergalactic nobility and must fight to protect the inhabitants of Earth from an ancient and destructive industry.  Short synopsis of Jupiter Ascending taken from IMDb.com

Jupiter Ascending...  I recall my wife mentioning that she say the trailer for this one during the Super Bowl.  I think it was the Super Bowl.  And she said it looked really good.  So I figured it must be one of the upcoming summer flicks that we'd have no money to go see.  Surprise me when it shows up in February, which is traditionally only rivalled by January as the place where film studios stick their undesirable offerings.

After the film came out in the box office, I read a review saying that it was not that great, and since I have been busy with work and had no real time to take my wife to the movies, I decided to put it off until it finally "ascended" to the local cheap seats.  A week or so ago, I took my wife and my eight year old daughter (she's getting old enough to go to this sort of fare, I suppose - my mom took me to action movies like this when I was around that age, though the content seems more adult than when I was a kid) to the movies.  How did Jupiter do, for me?  Read on and I'll elaborate.

First off, I thought Mila Kunis, in the role of a maid, had too much eye makeup on.  The story says she gets up every morning at 4:45 AM and works all day until nearly sunset, scrubbing toilets.  I'd have thought people's toilets wouldn't get that dirty that fast so that all you'd be doing is scrubbing them day in and day out, but what do I know?  However, having mentioned this make up thing when discussing the film within ear-shot of my wife, she quickly corrected me by saying that women will make themselves up so as to have something to make them feel better in their circumstances.  Yes, I can see that.  Chalk it up to me being a guy, and in many ways, an eminently practical one.  Eye make-up at 4:45 AM?  Seems silly and vain to me.  But who am I to judge?

One of the film's principal stars, Mila Kunis.  She's too made up to be a maid, in my opinion.  But again, what do I know? / Source: azcentral.com

Back to my point.  You really go to all that effort to do your makeup every morning when you are getting up at 4:45 AM and moaning about how you hate your life?  Mila's character, Jupiter, is just Cinderella in Russian illegal immigrant garb.  And her fairy godmother will soon come, in the form of Channing Tatum, playing an ex-space soldier who is half wolf, half human, and even used to have some nifty wings.  I could probably make that up if I tried, but it'd be a stretch.

Tatum and Kunis are running from alien bad guys from the moment they meet, when Channing's "splice" soldier character saves our heroine from a group of aliens who are disguised as doctors.  See, she got in on this scheme to sell her eggs to a fertility clinic, because she wants money to buy a telescope that is like the one her dead father had, and this seems like the easiest way to come up with some quick cash.  The aliens identify her as somebody they've been hired to kill, and if not for wolfie boy's last second appearance, she'd be one dead maid.  Off we go through some narrow escape chases, and the plot pretty much bounces between chase, action and exposition from here on out.

So in the film, this big spaceship flies right through this planet's ring system like a submarine breaking the surface of the ocean.  Really pretty visual.  But, uhm...  You just made a mess of that planet's ring formation.  It won't go back to how it was for a very long time.  And you've sent bits of dust, rock and ice spinning off into crazy trajectories.  It's gonna be all over the place.  For that stunt, you just made a gigantic environmental disaster and upset the natural order, just to look cool.  So thanks a lot, alien folks.  Thanks bunchs. / Source: clickclaque.com

Personally, I thought Channing and Kunis lacked chemistry.  Maybe that was Channing's fault though.  He tried to pull off his role, but seemed kinda flat to me.  Perhaps he was going for understated.  And the action scenes went on too long, even though they did evoke a nice edge of your seat gut reaction (especially the chase with the fighter plane-like space ships over and through Chicago).  The visuals were suitably impressive, though they evoked tinges of some of the Matrix films' style (duh, this film is from the same folks who wrote those, of course), as well as steampunkishness, the film John Carter, and a few others. 

The pacing and feel reminded me vaguely of The Fifth Element.  I did like the basic plot idea.  See, all of this back story leads up to the real meat of the film.  It's the old "humans are harvested throughout the galaxy to be used to keep these few entitled people young and beautiful"-thing.  Fairly clever, I thought.  Then again, it was a touch preachy.  Or should I say that the idea itself was preachy.  The plot didn't preach, but immediately jumped to moral high ground.  Or to an action scene.  Or to some exposition.  But as far as jumps go, they weren't the worst I've seen lately. 

Jupiter Ascending, despite its subsurface moral finger-wagging, is a film that reflects its times, so there is that.  I thought the entitled people idea was interesting and that they were, as a group, suitably villainous, though I'd like to have seen their plotline be just a bit less predictable.  And I liked the way the film embraces its own jargon and runs with it.  We don't stop to explain every little reference, but, like Lucas' Star Wars films, we talk about non-critical content as though the audience will just accept it and move on.  I refer to Luke Skywalker's comment early in A New Hope, "Ever since the XP-38 came out they just aren't in demand."  We don't need to know what an XP-38 is.  We get from context that Luke is mad because he can't sell his landspeeder for a good price and this is just moving the plot along.

The Wachowski's seem to love this pose.  Hands on two sticks, leaning forward, looking intense.  It's repeatedly done during the Battle of Zion in the third Matrix flick (don't remember?  I'm somehow unsurprised), and it is repeated again in Jupiter Ascending.  I couldn't find the image I wanted.  There is one of Tatum's character flying through a cloud of robot defender things, face taught, screaming in defiance.  So I substituted Captain Mifune ("Who?" you ask) from the aforementioned third Matrix film.  You get the idea. / Source: wjs.com (left), moviemorgue.wikia.com (right).


However, there was a problem.  Sometimes the sound editing in Jupiter Ascending seemed off, so much so that the character making the sci-fi comment was too quiet to be understood clearly.  If you're gonna throw stuff at people that the characters in the movie understand, but we regular folks don't, you gotta make sure we can hear it clearly enough.  Imagine if everyone in the Star Wars series had mumbled Boba Fett's name?  We'd all be calling him "Bona Fenn," "Bota Feg," "Boba Shabadu..."  Would he still be as cool?  You see what I mean.  Maybe it was the theater I was in, being a second-run outfit.  But I kinda doubt it.

Be that as it may, I thought Jupiter Ascending's take on a Cinderella-like story, crossed with lot's of space opera, to be quite fun.  And I especially liked the homage to the "Building that Makes People Go Mad," as seen in the animated film, The Twelve Tasks of Asterix.  Nicely done.  Even my wife caught that part.  Kunis' character quips at the end, "I'll never complain about the DMV again."  The joys of bureaucracy.

So was it worth the cheap seats ticket price?  Yes, I'd say it was.  This was definitely a big screen film.  The visuals are stunning, even though the non-Earth stuff looks far too video game-ish.  I don't know whether that is a spite at video games, or at the film industry that can't come up with something they didn't seem to borrow from video game design.   Either way, some of the exterior scenes looked like they were envisaged after someone played too much PlayStation.

This was pretty cool.  And I'd bet we'll have this sort of technology on Earth someday.  Don't like what your room looks like?  Just make it look like something else.  This laboratory place turns back into a grand... err, standing around room, I suppose you'd call it.  The perks of being royal.  Plus he's got this nifty torture chamber just below that he can see anytime he wants to.  Fulfills the inner sadist, I'm sure.  / Source: crash-from-movie-quote.weebly.com

My wife liked Jupiter Ascending, though she said the action scenes dragged on too long.  My daughter's eyes, on the other hand, were nearly popped out of her head by the fast-paced barrage of sights and sounds, and the girly sides of the plot charmed her too.  She announced when it was over, "We've GOT to buy that movie.  I want it SO much!"  But she's eight years old, so that is no surprise. 

There is a bit of language, and of course the violence and semi-adult themes.  This movie could have made PG instead of PG-13, had they toned it down in a few places.  But then the film doesn't seem to know what it wants to deliver, at times.  A flaw it shares with some of the Wachowski offerings since 1999's ground-breaking The Matrix.  Hey, even George Lucas' Star Wars films were only half good (if you count the whole six out so far, that is).  All in all, I though Jupiter Ascending was a bit flat in some of its notes, but overall a worthwhile cheap seats excursion.  Nothing I'd watch over and over.  I hope not, anyway.


The parting comment:


I'd have preferred a "How It Should Have Ended" video, myself.  Maybe one of these days they'll do one.