Over-amped, underwritten ‘Jupiter Ascending’ never gets off the ground
So, Ned Stark and Stephen Hawking walk into an exploding spaceship … OK, not exactly, but doesn’t a sci-fi action adventure with featured performances by Sean Bean and Eddie Redmayne sound like fun? Especially when it’s put together by dynamic duo Lana and Andy Wachowski, the filmmaking siblings who made the Matrix trilogy and Cloud Atlas. Shouldn’t viewers at least have the right to expect some cool, silly, eye-popping fun?
But, alas, such expectations are not met in Jupiter Ascending. Not by a long shot, an incredible disappointment considering all the talent involved. Extreme visuals, check. Complicated storyline unfolding in separate realms, check. Slick modes of transportation (like anti-gravity boots and cloaked ships that dissolve in and out of the air), check.
But here’s the problem: who cares? Clearly, what gave Cloud Atlas (flawed as it was) its lingering soulfulness was the time-traveling story of humanity on a quest to understand itself, which came straight from its source material, the David Mitchell novel. Left to their own devices, once again acting as their own scriptwriters, the Wachowskis concoct nothing but chaos.
The quest at the heart of this movie reads more like a typical Young Adult fantasy novel. A modern young woman named Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), born “without a country,” at sea, to an immigrant Russian mother (Maria Doyle Kennedy), is marginally employed, with most of the rest of her family cleaning the houses of rich people in Chicago. Until the day some gnarly aliens try to kill her, except she’s rescued by Caine (Channing Tatum), a hunky, genetically engineered hybrid (part-humanoid, part wolf), called a “splice.”
Turns out her genetic make-up qualifies her for a cosmic inheritance, and she’s whisked off to a fabulous palace in some alien otherworld to claim it. It also puts her in opposition to the three royal Abrasax siblings who will stop at nothing to gain her birthright—charming Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), who tries to befriend the bewildered Jupiter; her pretty brother, Titus (Douglas Booth), who tries to woo her; and their scheming brother, Balem (Redmayne, all precise, purring menace), who means to have his way, at any cost.
Meanwhile, Caine enlists the aid of his old compatriot, Stinger (Bean), now stranded on Earth, to help him protect Jupiter. It’s the kind of movie where you can tell these guys are old pals with a lot of history by the way they try to beat each other to a pulp—interminably —as soon as they lay eyes on each other again. (It’s also the kind of movie where a young woman who cleans toilets for a living goes to work every day with perfect eye make-up. Hey, didn’t I say it was YA?)
The story might be serviceable enough (The Princess Diaries in outer space?), except the Wachowskis don’t do anything interesting with it. It’s just a vehicle on which to hang boring, repetitive special effects, shootouts, and lots of stuff blowing up, none of which the viewer has any emotional investment in. The sight of Caine zipping around in mid-air, skateboarder-like, his glowing boots leaving a vapor trail behind him, is really cool the first time, but used over and over again, it just becomes an effect.
Ditto endless dogfights involving dozens of lookalike ships impossible to tell apart, laying waste to everything in their path. When most of the Chicago skyline is destroyed in one early scene—trains, skyscrapers, traffic all reduced to smoking rubble—Caine assures Jupiter it’s okay, because alien magic rebuilds everything in a flash. But shouldn’t somebody at least mention the human lives lost in the carnage? It’s random video-game violence, without purpose or consequence.
Tatum, in slightly pointed ears, does a nice job of conveying Caine’s wolfish instincts, like a trace of throaty growl when he senses danger. (But they could have done more with him as a romantic lead besides a smitten Jupiter telling him she’s always loved dogs.) The Wachowskis do have fun with alien bureaucracy in one comic sequence. And there is one very cool image in almost the last frame of the film that only makes us wish the Wachowskis had taken the time to devise a story worth telling.
JUPITER ASCENDING
** (out of four)
With Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Sean Bean, and Eddie Redmayne. Written and directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski. A Warner Bros. release. Rated PG-13. 127 minutes.
