Review: Jupiter Ascending

Mila Kunis stars as Jupiter Jones, a toilet cleaner of Russian extraction living in the United States. Her father was an astronomer who met an untimely end before her mother fled with her to Chicago years ago. Jupiter has decided to earn money by selling her eggs in order to afford a telescope. Unfortunately, the doctors and nurses carrying out the procedure are actually aliens attempting to kill her. She is narrowly saved from death by a blonde-haired, guyliner wearing half-human/half-dog named Caine (Channing Tatum), supposedly a genetically-mutated bounty hunter who has hovering boots (!). He quickly offers up the exposition of the piece: A family of effete intergalactic snobby fops farm the inhabitants of other planets to help rejuvenate their own. This poncy royal family are apparently the ancestors of Earth’s human inhabitants. Jupiter is the potential fly in the ointment (so to speak) because it has been discovered that she is the reincarnation of the matriarch of House of Abrasax, and therefore mother to whispery, effete Balem (Eddie Redmayne, acting a bit like Effie Trinket with a tracheotomy) and siblings Titus (Douglas Booth) and Kalique (played by the uber-posh named Tuppence Middleton). Basically, Jupiter has it in her to save the Earth. Therefore, Jupiter is targeted for death by Balem, with only Caine and his Astro Boy boots to protect her. But who is Caine working for? And what are Titus and Kalique up to? Sean Bean plays another bounty hunter, Kick Gurry plays Jupiter’s no-good cousin, and Terry Gilliam has a cameo as an intergalactic politician of sorts.

 

Although not as bad as anticipated, this 2015 sci-fi flick is yet another failure from The Wachowskis, who started so brilliantly with “Bound” and “The Matrix”. It’s too bizarre to be dull, there’s some fun action here and there, and Mila Kunis is quite underrated in the lead. Unfortunately, a raspy Eddie Redmayne acts a total arsehat in his post-Oscar performance and it’s both silly and overstuffed with way too much indecipherable jargon and plotting that is very difficult to follow. Jargon-heavy and exposition-heavy dialogue whizz by way too fast to really find one’s bearings. The film needs a damn prequel just to explain itself, maybe an instruction manual for us dummies, too. Some of you will find it awfully impenetrable, and dialogue like ‘It’s just a planet, Jupiter’ if meant seriously, is just eye-rollingly misguided (At least her name’s not Uranus, though I suppose). FX straight out of 2002 don’t help, either (The fake backgrounds are especially poor). Still, there’s enough weirdness and action that I was at least conscious throughout, it’s definitely not as useless and empty as “The Matrix Reloaded”. Amusing cameo by Terry Gilliam, too. I bet he just loved the script, it’s his kinda madness.

 

Despite the archaic FX, I really liked the idea of setting what would normally be outer space battles on the streets of the U.S., that was quite a bit of fun in an “ID4” kind of way. Hampered by poor FX or not, the Wachowskis can’t be accused of not having a vision. Even the ridiculous and ill-advised Eddie Redmayne performance can at least be said to be unique to the filmmakers. (It can, however also be said to be a uniquely awful and embarrassingly bad performance. One year after giving one of the year’s best performances, here’s one of 2015’s absolute worst!). Once a character named Intergalactic Advocate Bob (Samuel Barnett) turns up, it’s obvious that the Wachowskis have advised Redmayne to deliberately pitch his performance somewhere in the vicinity of an asthmatic, lethargic drag queen with occasional shrill outbursts with a kind of Tourette’s cadence. Okie doke, that’s certainly a vision. Yet I have to say that it’s a vision that I found particularly silly and hard to take here for the most part. It’s unique, but very, very silly and just too much to make sense of in short time. If you’ve ever seen the kinky sci-fi series “Lexx”, there’s a whole lotta “Lexx” to this. That may be considered a compliment to some of you. I never quite got around to working out whether I actually liked “Lexx” or not, I just couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and it was never as naughty as I kept hoping it would be. But if you’ve ever wanted to see “Superman” with a blonde Channing Tatum in the title role, Mila Kunis as Lois Lane, and Lex Luthor as a drag queen with tuberculosis, here’s your movie (You can see a lot of “Star Wars” too, with Kunis as a mixture of Luke and Leia, and Sean Bean essentially playing Lando Calrissian in “The Empire Strikes Back”).

 

Channing Tatum (who seems to have been forced at gunpoint to appear in this) looks absurd and the film threatens to go in an oh-so wrong area when he reveals that his species is closer to dog than human. I should point out that we’re talking about a film that features a woman with Dumbo ears and it’s no big thing. That’s how ridiculous Tatum looks. It’s not the blonde hair and goatee, it’s the fucking guyliner. In fact, I’d almost swear the role was meant to go to Chris Hemsworth, and Tatum knocked him out in his dressing room, dyed his own hair blonde and turned up on set in his place. I’m on to you, Tatum. Mind you, Hemsworth’s probably glad he dodged a bullet, you’re the fool who ended up in the film looking like a horse’s arse. Meanwhile, the Wachowskis seem to like Aussie actor Kick Gurry, having previously cast him in their rather distancing “Speed Racer”. I just can’t abide by a guy named Kick. I want to punch him (Hypothetically speaking, of course). Douglas Booth is a boring himbo given way too much prominence in the film, but Bean is pretty solid, and does something very, very rare for him on screen. Those who know will smile at the realisation, those who don’t know, well you won’t care, but I found it a rather amusing change from the norm myself.

 

Clearly not a film for everyone, this is quite impenetrable and jargon-heavy at times, and both Eddie Redmayne and Channing Tatum make complete arses of themselves. The former strikes every wrong note at once, which I suppose is kind of an achievement. His attempt at playing haughty arrogance is to act like he’s smelling his own farts and looking like he’s about to yawn. However, I actually did like elements of this crazy/stupid film. The action is at times thrilling (despite less than convincing FX), Mila Kunis is appealing in the lead, and the whole thing is fucking wacky. That’s something. What a mess, though. Needing a prequel to really get the audience up to speed, it’s no wonder many people refer to this as The Wachowskis “Dune”. How the mighty hath fallen.

 

Rating: C