I have to give the Wachowskis’s Jupiter Ascending credit for this: The trend in film these days is to take one slim book and streeeeetch it into two or three movies (I’m lookin’ at you Hobbit trilogy). But their original screenplay for Jupiter Ascending could easily have been turned into three films. It’s positively engorged with plot. (Imagine if Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi were all crammed into one 127-minute film and you get the basic idea.)
Is that necessarily a bad thing? Well no. But, in this case, it can be a bit overwhelming. Backstories and plot twists come at us at breakneck speed. Monsters, shape-shifting aliens, muggles, warriors, royals, and even—in the film’s best sequence—intergalactic bureaucrats (a sly nod to Brazil that even features a Terry Gilliam cameo!) are all trotted out, exhaustingly. Nothing is developed, there’s little time for showing, so there’s a whole lot of telling. Every time we hope the film will pause and savor, it whips us along to the next scene.
It doesn’t help that there’s a nagging sense that we’re spending the most time with some of the galaxy’s least interesting characters. While I enjoyed Channing Tatum’s part-wolf, part-man, cyber-skating, disgraced warrior Caine, I was even more interested in his mentor Stinger (Sean Bean), who’s living on earth in a secluded bee-farm with his sickly daughter. And while I thought Mila Kunis was just fine as a humble, star-gazing maid who discovers she’s actually the reincarnation of an intergalactic queen, I was more interested in Nikki Amuka Bird as a brave and ethical commander of her own space ship and Doona Bae’s purple-haired, badass outlaw, who sporadically flies into the action. It’s strange to think that the coolest stuff might actually be happening off-camera. (The fact that the great Gugu Mbatha-Raw—playing a royal consigliere of sorts with a beautiful face and ears the size of a bloodhound—only has a few lines is just another example of what I’m talking about here.)
And then there’s the film’s CGI. While dazzling in its own way, it never feels sufficiently tactile. With the best CGI, you can’t tell what’s fake and what’s real. Here, things blow up, cities are destroyed, people whiz by on flying scooters, whole planets are laid out before us, and none of it truly resonates. It all just feels like so much empty spectacle.
Anyway, from what I can gather, here’s the plot (don’t hold me to this): We have three royal siblings—Eddie Redmayne’s sulking Balem, Douglas Booth’s hedonistic Titus, and Tuppence Middleton’s vain Kalique—who all want control of Earth, which they will harvest for the one resource that keeps them perennially young—liquefied humans. (Cue the Soylent Green jokes.) But before they can seize control of Earth, they need Kunis’s Jupiter Jones (best name ever?), the reincarnation of their late mother, to either die or sign over the planet’s rights. Each sibling has hired a different bounty hunter—including Tatum’s Caine—to track down Jupiter, and they all have a different strategy to get her to bend to their will.
A moment, if you will, to make fun of Eddie Redmayne, who is ludicrously campy as the spoiled Balem—all petulant whispers punctured by table-slamming bursts of RAGE!!! My audience tittered nearly every time he was on screen. (It’s the kind of thing that makes you appreciate Tom Hiddleston’s Loki all the more—that kind of stylized performance can go wrong in a hurry.) (That being said, good luck at the Oscars next Sunday, Eddie!)
Mila Kunis’s character is problematic, too, because she seems like a throwback to a time when it was acceptable for movie heroines to mostly be decorative damsels in distress. They give her a possibly interesting backstory—a large Russian immigrant family that, yes, feels like it deserves its own separate movie; and a best friend who seems central to the action until she…doesn’t—but she’s mostly acted upon, she has no agency. (The critic @jamesrocchi nailed it when he noted that her two main forms of transportation are being kidnapped and being rescued.) Of course, it’s impossible not to compare Jupiter to the similar Neo in the Wachowskis’s The Matrix. After finding out that he was the chosen one, Neo got to save the day. Jupiter gets to swoon over Caine.
But maybe Jupiter will become as cool as her name in the next installment? I’ve heard no talk of this being a series, but it’s the one thing that actually makes sense. Maybe this film is like an overture, a greatest hit compilation. In subsequent installments, we’ll find out more about Jupiter and Stinger and all those cool she-warriors. As a standalone, however, it’s an oddity—the rare film that leaves you wanting less.