, the $175 million space opera written and
directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski, has a few moments of intentional
humor. It has several more moments of unintentional humor. And it has
moments of humor—such as the exchange above—that defy categorization
altogether.
Jupiter Jones
(Mila Kunis), an ordinary earthling thrust into the
middle of a cosmic conspiracy, has just declared her love for Caine Wise
(Channing Tatum), an extraterrestrial human-wolf hybrid with a knack
for rescuing her from trouble. He rebuffs her affections on
quasi-bestiality grounds, and she responds with a declaration of canophilia.
The entire audience with whom I saw the film erupted into guffaws. But
I’m not sure any of us quite knew whether we were laughing with the
movie or at it.
There are moments of charm, or almost-charm, scattered throughout Jupiter Ascending, and with a lighter touch it might have worked as a whimsical space fantasy—a kind of third-rate Guardians of the Galaxy.
But the Wachowskis lack such a touch (as they have their entire
careers) and instead strive for a parable about love and class that
eludes them utterly. Jupiter Ascending is too self-serious a movie to offer silly escapism, and too silly a movie to take at all seriously.
When the story begins, Jupiter is a young Russian immigrant living
with her extended working-class family in Chicago. Every morning, her
alarm goes off at 4:45 a.m. and she, her mother, and her aunt begin a
long day cleaning the homes of rich folks; Jupiter’s specific task is
scrubbing the toilets. Until one day, when her shiftless cousin
persuades her to sell her eggs to a fertility clinic for $15,000 so that
he can buy an entertainment center and she can buy a telescope. (Her
father, murdered during a break-in before she was born, was an
astronomer. Hence: Jupiter.) When she visits the clinic, however, she is
set upon by murderous aliens and saved by Caine.
It turns out that the human race extends far across the galaxy, and
Earth is but the tiny colony of a vast empire. Worse, it is slated for
imminent “harvest.” (I won’t say precisely what this means, because it
is the subject of a Big Reveal late in the film. But if you haven’t
figured it out within the first 20 minutes, it's probably because you've
fallen asleep.) Unbeknownst to her, Jupiter is the exact genetic
duplicate of a deceased interstellar matriarch and, as such, the lawful
inheritor of the Earth itself. Unfortunately, said matriarch had three
children (played by Eddie Redmayne, Douglas Booth, and Tuppence
Middleton), none of whom are inclined to let Jupiter keep her prize.
Trouble, predictably, ensues.
Kunis is perfectly solid as the decent, ingenuous, dog-loving
Jupiter, though the character makes for a remarkably feeble heroine. Her
principal function in the film is to be hoodwinked, in sequence, by
every one of the movie’s astro-schemers, and to require rescuing by
Caine approximately once every 15 minutes for just over two hours. One
would be hard-pressed to find a less capable female protagonist in
contemporary cinema. Moreover, despite the film’s aspirations of
intergalactic (and inter-species) romance, she and Tatum have no
discernible chemistry.
Maybe it’s the ears? Befitting his genetic heritage, Caine’s are tall
and pointy, and accompanied by a lupine goatee and elongated canines.
He is also predisposed to theatrical sniffing and, on occasion,
snarling. Picture a burlier version of Johnny Depp’s Big Bad Wolf from Into the Woods
and you won’t be far off. It’s worth noting, however, that whereas
Depp’s performance was a self-parodying cameo, Tatum is the male lead.
Woof.
The rest of the cast fares little better. Sean Bean shows up as an
old colleague of Caine’s described as a “Han Solo-type character,” which
is always a bad sign. Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Belle, Beyond the Lights)
has a small role as a functionary sporting ears that look like
flattened sweet potatoes. (I had to look online to learn that this is
because her character was genetically spliced with a deer. Why? I have no idea. The film is mercifully devoid of sleighs.) And one can only imagine how dearly Best-Actor-nominated
Redmayne must hope that no one casting an Oscar ballot catches his
performance here, which consists of one long, wheezing whisper
punctuated by occasional, Pacino-esque barks.
Visually, the movie has its moments—for $175 million, you’d hope it
would—notable among them the gravity skates that allow Caine to slalom
through the air. But more often than not the effects and production
design feel openly derivative and already slightly out-of-date. There
are conspicuous echoes of Stars Wars, The Fifth Element, Transformers, Men In Black, Brazil (Terry Gilliam has a small cameo), Signs,
and at least a dozen more. And don’t even get me started on the aliens,
many of whom would have been turned away from the cantina door in Mos
Eisley. A rat hybrid played by Edward Hogg seems to have wandered in
from a 1980s production of Cats, and the winged, leather-jacket-clad Lizard Men heavies look as though they should probably find some Ninja Turtles to menace.
The plot of the movie is cursory at best, with a narrative coda so
insipid it made my head hurt. The dialogue is comically bad (“Bees are
genetically designed to respond to royalty”; “In our world genes have an
almost spiritual significance”), and the action sequences are
repetitive to the point of redundancy.
It’s been a long time—arguably
more than 15 years—since the Wachowskis made a good movie. But the one
trait for which they deserve genuine credit is their tenacious
commitment to an independent vision of blockbuster filmmaking. Despite
its many, many flaws, Jupiter Ascending is not a sequel,
prequel, reboot, spinoff, or “pre-sold” property of any kind, and these
days that is no small thing. Hollywood’s risk aversion and franchise
addiction are a real, and worsening, problem. Alas, Jupiter Ascending is unlikely to persuade anyone of the virtues of originality.
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