Jupiter Ascending

It takes a certain kind of talent to pull off a movie this inept.  Lesser filmmakers would have stopped at just merely making a bad movie.  Jupiter Ascending shoots for the moon when it comes to awfulness, and reaches it.  Sure, the movie looks like it cost a few hundred million to make.  But if you strip away the big budget and name actors, make it black and white and replace the complex alien worlds with cardboard cutout sets, this script would be right at home on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

The movie is the brainchild of Andy and Lana Wachowski, who got their start in indie films, then hit it big with The Matrix.  Ever since then, their career has been quite rocky, but even in their more disappointing efforts, I have found something to admire.  Here, the filmmaking duo strike out completely.  It's not just the fact that there seems to be no detectable heart or soul behind the picture, and that it often comes across as a really expensive technical demo that leaves no impression on the audience.  It's also the fact that the dialogue is some of the worst I have heard in a Sci-Fi movie since the Star Wars prequels.  It''s clear that the movie wants to be about something, and dazzle our imaginations with its massive alien worlds.  But look behind the visual splendor and droning dialogue about purpose and destiny, and you will find very little.  I will be honest, the only thing that kept me in my theater seat was seeing just how wrong the movie was going to go next.

Just like in The Matrix, Jupiter Ascending is the story of a seemingly ordinary person who is destined for greater things.  This time, the unsuspecting hero is Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), a young woman who lives in a house filled with arguing Russian stereotypes, and makes her living cleaning toilets.  We learn early on that her father was a man fascinated in astronomy, particularly in the planet Jupiter, which is where her name came from.  Unfortunately, she never knew her father, as he was murdered by some hoods who tried to steal his telescope before she was born.  Jupiter has come to the conclusion that her life is always going to be boring and ordinary, until she starts seeing slimy little gray aliens who can make themselves invisible at will coming to kill her.  Another alien comes to her rescue, this one being a mercenary named Cain Wise (Channing Tatum). 

The moment we lay eyes on Tatum's character, we sense something is off.  He looks uncomfortable wearing some weird make up and face prosthetics to make him look alien.  Perhaps this explains his low key performance, where he can barely seem to muster the slightest amount of emotion in reading his dialogue.  Likewise, Mila Kuna as Jupiter comes across as a non-entity, because of the way she is portrayed.  Kunis has the same blank expression on her face, whether she's looking down into a toilet, or witnessing a vast alien city sprawling before her for the first time.  Her dialogue mainly consists of simple phrases like, "holy crap" or "could this get any weirder" when she comes face to face with lizard foot soldiers and elephant men who can pilot spaceships.  Their total lack of chemistry not only makes it hard to get behind their characters, but it makes it hard to get involved in the plot they're stranded in, as they don't even seem to care much.

We eventually learn that Jupiter is the reincarnation of an alien queen, who was supposedly murdered by one of her three treacherous children.  Now that Jupiter has come to take her rightful place as the queen, her lead scheming son, Balem (Eddie Redmayne), wants to make sure she doesn't live to do so.  I must once again pause and focus on a performance here, because Redmayne (who is nominated for an Oscar this year for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything) delivers a performance so bad, it might become legendary.  He's as bad here as he's good in the film he's nominated for.  His performance consists of speaking in a very hoarse and not very intimidating whisper at all times.  And then, without warning, he will suddenly bellow some random line at the top of his lungs.  Should Redmayne's career flourish (and I truly hope it does), don't look for any clips of this film to show up during his career highlight reel in the future.

The plot eventually involves some kind of substance that keeps the ruling alien class eternally young.  In order to make the substance, they have to "harvest" entire planets by wiping out their population, and using the dead as its main ingredient.  It looks as if Earth is the next planet set to be harvested, but it makes absolutely no dramatic impact in this movie.  If you build your plot around human genocide, and you can't even get a reaction from your audience, you're probably not trying hard enough.  Instead, all we get is a lot of long-winded exposition, and a lot of action sequences that seem to be staged as a demo for a tie-in video game.  There's a lot of flying around, a lot of frantic activity and a lot of CG aliens running about the screen, but again, it leaves absolutely no impact.  I can admire that it's been competently done, but if it leaves no impression, you're just watching a soulless technical demo.

Soulless is as good a word as any I would use to describe Jupiter Ascending.  On the surface, it appears to be a dazzling spectacle, but there's just absolutely nothing to grab our attention aside from some pretty images that show up briefly.  This is one of the goofiest big budget movies I have seen since Winter's Tale.  How fitting that not only are both movies from the same studio (Warner Bros.), but that they're also released almost a year apart from each other.

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