There’s a common adage among film critics that we’d rather see a messy film from a distinctive filmmaker trying to say something than a perfectly calibrated piece of fluff from a pedestrian one, and there are multiple points at which Jupiter Ascending seems to be testing the tensile strength of such a notion. Often willfully obtuse, disinterested in character development to a fault and only fitfully exciting, the latest film from Wachowskis Lana and Andy makes no concessions towards meeting its audience halfway. We are thrown into a dazzling feat of world-building that feels uniquely Wachowskian with little to help us gain equilibrium. Just look at the initial scene, a brother and sister wandering around an (unwillingly) abandoned planet and eventually joined by their older brother for a rousing discussion of inherited wealth, profit overhead and the possibility of exchanging land. This is the opposite of hitting the ground running, and gives a strong sense of where their interests lie with this particular story. Much like the kinetic ball of joy that is Speed Racer, they’re examining the notions of corporate greed and a society that exploits the weak in service of the powerful, but it’s done on a massive scale here, with the entire galaxy and planets being divided amongst capricious heirs the same way antique jewelry would be among the living here.
I’ll give a college try to explaining the plot, although the whole thing plays like a campaign of Dungeons and Dragons that has been lived in for years on end with ceaseless world-building, but generic character templates residing at its center. Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) lives in Chicago, cleaning houses for a living when it is discovered she is the genetic reincarnation of a deceased space queen. This is unwelcome news to the three heirs to the Abrasax clan fortune (Eddie Redmayne, Douglas Booth and Tuppence Middleton), as it heralds the dissolution of their planetary inheritance. See, Redmayne’s Balem is currently in line to inherit the Earth, but in this far-flung society contingencies are made for reincarnation that would revert said ownership. This doesn’t sit well with any of the Abrasaxes, who send a platoon of distinctively odd characters (tiny grey aliens, walking dragon men and robotic duplicates to name a few) to either capture or kill Jupiter. Luckily for Ms. Jones, dishonorably discharged space solider Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a wolf-human hybrid with gravity-defying rocket boots, has been sent as protection and thus begins a chess game played on the most massively ornate playing field you can imagine.
It takes a while for the chemistry between Tatum and Kunis to really develop (and once it does, it’s buoyed by rousing third act filmmaking/editing), but that’s less a failing of the performers than a side effect of the film’s breathless pace that doesn’t take time to establish any of its characters’ emotional states, instead choosing to grind the exquisitely simplistic gears of the plot forward. Nobody is ever really given the opportunity to leave their mark on the film, but who has time for such frivolities when there are chases through a crumbling mining city involving wolf-men and dragon-people to invest in? The one stand-out performance even given a paltry amount of screentime belong to Oscar frontrunner Eddie Redmayne, speaking the majority of his lines in a mumble infrequently punctuated by petulant screaming. It’s an oasis of scenery-chewing calm in a movie that is otherwise schizophrenically busy. The action is unfortunately pretty standard issue given the rather dynamic world they’ve built, but you get the sense that the Wachowskis are most invested in crafting sequences like the one where Kunis’ character is pulled through a bureaucratic nightmare of paperwork in trying to establish her status as reincarnated heir. They’re interested in the nuts and bolts and odd corners of the universe they’ve built from the ground up here, and if similar befuddling attempts at sci-fi epics such as David Lynch’s Dune or Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element spoke to you thanks to their intense personal visions, there’s a good chance this will work for you as well as it did for me. But for many others I fear the designation of this genre as ‘space opera’ is pretty apt, as it will only draw a niche audience to its completely earnest sentiments while drawing eye-rolls and yawns from the rest.
