The Wachowskis definitely think big and Jupiter Ascending is no exception, but they can’t seem to let their grand designs take a back seat to the story they wish to tell. Just imagine the mumbo-jumbo of the two Matrix sequels, stuffed into the very first film and yet it still ran for only 136 minutes. Think about everything that would have been cut. Neo wouldn’t have even questioned the rabbit hole, there would have been no time to remove tracking devices or learn Kung fu. Get it out of here, we need to explain the key maker, excise the twins and somehow make sense of the Architect. Ergo, we are concurrently left with a movie where some details may seem pertinent, yet the overall feature is most irrelevant.
In this respect, Jupiter Ascending is essentially a trilogy of films with the soul of the film gutted, packing what remains into 127 minutes of redundant action sequences and bad decision making. Yes, the Wachowskis definitely stage a breathtaking bit of CG action, but the story is reduced to characters going from here to there for reasons that are either convoluted or pointless to the point I was asking myself “What is going on?” and the answer was “Why do I care?”
From one “breathless” minute to the next we’re introduced to Mila Kunis as Jupiter Jones. Her astronomy-loving father was killed before she was born and now she and her mother work as maids in Chicago. Thing is, not only does Jupiter have a laugh-inducing name, she also has a genetic code that marks her as the heir to something quite grand and there are forces in the universe that would prefer to see her dead rather than become a wrench in the intergalactic game of cosmic capitalism.
As three siblings race to either capture (for unspecified reasons), marry (for obvious reasons) or kill (for good reason) Jupiter, she finds a protector in Cain (Channing Tatum), a half-wolf, half-man, genetically engineered super soldier with gravity boots who would kill at roller derby. The biggest problem is who can they trust?
They clearly can’t trust the galaxy’s biggest asshole, Balem, played by Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything), who is clearly the baddest of the bad, sounding like a pouty fourth grader that smokes two cartons a day. I never quite got a firm grasp of what all he controlled in the universe or how exactly the whole royal aspect of the film worked, but his intentions are pretty much clear once you hit the halfway mark. One thing I’d recommend that might cheer him up a bit is to find a hobby, sitting in a chair looking out a giant window all day, waiting for people to come by, has got to get lonely.
Balem is in competition with his two other siblings, Titus (Douglas Booth) and Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), both of whom play a large role in the film until they don’t. What happens to them I don’t really know, but Middleton does her best to distract from the tedium by stepping out of her anti-aging pool to give us not only a glimpse of her bare backside, but a little more information on just what the hell is going on. I thank her for her contributions.
While the audience is trying to get a grasp of why exactly they are watching what they are watching, the Wachowskis offer up one action sequence after another, not a single one of them necessarily feeling unique and some playing a bit too similarly to the one right before it. Making matters even more tedious, every bit of action comes with an “Oh no, will they make it?” arbitrary countdown. Will Jupiter die in the first minutes of the movie? Will Cain get to her before she stupidly marries Titus? Will she sign over her inheritance to Balem, thus ending life on Earth all to save her family for a day or two? You can answer these questions without seeing the movie so when they appear here, under the guise of fake tension, it’s more annoying than anything else, especially considering how poorly written Jupiter is as a character. Well, maybe that’s not fair.
I haven’t read the Wachowski’s script for Jupiter Ascending, perhaps it’s much longer and detailed than what we get in the film. That said, the character is presented here as gullible and entirely dependent on others. After knowing Caine for what could only be a day or two she’s already falling in love and after knowing Titus for mere minutes she gives in to his every wish. Perhaps this is due to scenes having been edited out, which wouldn’t surprise me the way this thing moves from one scene to the next. One thing is for sure, it doesn’t waste much time in any one place before another bit of action is taking place, but all that action means character and story development are an afterthought. I’m not sure what has happened since The Matrix, but back then the Wachowskis could tell story within the confines of their action sequences whereas now they play like interludes, and lengthy ones at that.
Kunis is given little to do as an actor, Tatum is more or less a mindless military grunt and Redmayne is pretty much the character you see in the trailers. The most interesting performances/characters in the cast come from Nikki Amuka-Bird as the captain of the space police and a surprise appearance from Terry Gilliam as an intergalactic government employee. Oh, and then there’s the half-elephant, half-human pilot of the space police cruiser, whom I guess is the equivalent of Lando’s silly co-pilot in Return of the Jedi. All I know is he was good for a laugh as CG buildings were exploding and Michael Giacchino‘s “Oh no, are they going to make it?” music was playing.
Jupiter Ascending is something of a sci-fi telling of Disney’s Cinderella had Cinderella ended up becoming queen of the kingdom and hooked up with one of the mice. And while I don’t know what I’m supposed to take away from that, what was accomplished or what I was meant to feel, I wouldn’t say the Wachowskis don’t care about their characters but they sure weren’t able to give them much of a soul. By the end, we’re scratching our heads wondering about abandoned subplots and forgotten characters as a whole universe of possibilities were opened to us and yet it seems none of it really mattered.
