Jupiter Ascending: A Review

The Wachowski Siblings are unique among blockbuster filmmakers in that they have a wonderful sense of visual design and a great knack for creating crowd-pleasing popcorn movies that nobody actually goes to see. Seriously, after The Matrix kind of flared out the Wachowskis have tried again and again to replicate that early success with no luck. And they've tried it the smart way too, not just remaking The Matrix but by making new and different things like Speed Racer or Cloud Atlas, at least trying to show they weren't one trick ponies and earning critical acclaim along the way. And their latest effort, a high-concept space opera in the vein of Dune called Jupiter Ascending, already looks like it will suffer the same fate

Right off the back I want to give the Wachowskis credit for coming up with an original property and story. Jupiter Ascending is the tale of Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), a Russian immigrant working as a janitor in Chicago. Her humdrum life is suddenly upended though when she's molested by aliens, rescued by the wolfman Caine (Channing Tatum), and learns she's the genetic reincarnation of what is effectively the Queen of the Universe. And as such, Jupiter is entitled to claim the former queen's position and property for herself. This information doesn't sit well with the former queen's children though, wary of any threat to their inheritance and wealth. Jupiter becomes caught in their power struggle, being manipulated and sometimes outright threatened into siding with one of them over the others. Things come to head when Balim (Eddie Redmayne), the crown prince, kidnaps Jupiter's family from Earth to force her into abdicating her position to him. And so the race is on to see who will control the universe and along the way Jupiter and Caine fall in love.

Mila Kunis as Jupiter.
I had much the same look watching this movie.

That sounds like a pretty solid foundation for a sci-fi action movie, and true to form the Wachowskis throw in some light philosophical touches to add some flavor to the story. But the filmmakers squander that foundation with terrible pacing and poor structure. The narrative throws so many ideas, sci-fi concepts, characters, and story turns at the audience so fast that they barely have a chance to get everything straight before the story pulls yet another rug out from under them. If the two Matrix sequels were one movie stretched into two, Jupiter Ascending feels like an entire trilogy crammed into a single film. Because of this, all the characters' motivations feel very truncated and elements drop in and out of the story at random. Like the romance between Jupiter and Caine, it literally comes out of nowhere with absolutely no build up or foreshadowing in the middle of the movie.

And despite the fact that almost every scene that isn't part of an action sequence is exposition, the many concepts are barely fleshed out. The story keeps bringing up issues of trust, ideas about genetic predestination, and even some mild Marxist critique but the film is so focused on delivering big sci-fi action and creating wondrous visuals that the attempts at depth just end up as window dressing. The emphasis on action and visuals hurts the characters as well, giving them paper-thin personalities and leaving the actors no option but to fall back into broad cliche just to keep from being boring. Jupiter especially is a terribly written main character. Mila Kunis does what she can, but the story forces Jupiter to be very passive, and Kunis can do little but look astonished at whatever new spectacular tableau the Wachowskis whip up while her character gets batted back and forth between characters with more agency and motivation. But the worst character and performance is Balim, our ostensible villain. Redmayne plays him very mincing and wheezes out every line in a coarse whisper, making a character that should be intimidating just boring. If Redmayne had gone either totally serious or totally campy his performance could have been saved, but he's somewhere in the middle and it just doesn't work.

At least the spaceships look nice.

It's a shame that the underlying structure is such a mess because the surface of the film is very beautiful. If the Wachowskis put all their emphasis on the action and visuals, at least it paid off. These are two filmmakers who always have great production design and this film is no different. Drawing on things like The Fifth Element and Guardians of the Galaxy, Jupiter Ascending has some spectacular spaceships, fun aliens, and great space visuals. I especially like how the royal spaceships have more of a cathedral aesthetic than the usual battleship look, and the ubiquity of zero-gravity technology in all the gadgets. It creates a unique and unified look for the film. And the action scenes, though a bit too long, are the same. Frenetic but not confusing, they're just as inventive, as though the camera has been mounted on a roller coaster track following our characters as they fall, zoom, and swerve through the air. They make great eye candy even if they don't add anything meaningful to the proceedings.

One thing I will credit the sloppy narrative is that it doesn't try to go too big with the stakes. While the threat of Earth's destruction is present from the beginning, it remains more of a looming consequence than an immediate danger. The actual stakes of the story remain firmly set with Jupiter and her decisions about her genetic inheritance. The film probably would have been better if the narrative focused closer on this aspect of the story, playing up the more political Game of Thrones element of a nobody suddenly gaining absolute power. There's a little bit of that here, but it gets buried beneath the action and squeezed out by the pacing. And the music by Michael Giacchino is excellent as usual for him, having a very orchestral Star Wars feel without directly sounding like John Williams.

Jupiter Ascending is ultimately a failure, but it's not for a lack of trying. The Wachowskis nobly attempt to create a new sci-fi universe full of big ideas and neat visuals, and succeed on the second front at least. This is a very cool-looking movie, with stunning space tableaus and creative gadgets. But they don't give their world or their film any chance to breath and settle into itself. It's so determined to move at lightspeed that the overall experience is almost too shallow to leave any impact. And the story they're telling is so muddled that examining it in any depth is just confusing at best. I really wanted to like this movie, and I appreciate what the Wachowskis were trying to do, but in the end Jupiter Ascending is just more sci-fi eye candy. What a shame.

Final Score: 2/5