Jupiter Ascending (2015, Dir. The Wachkowskis):
By the time you read this review, Andy and Lana Wachkowski’s Jupiter Ascending will have already been banished from the cinemas, a certified box office bomb. Still, let’s take a moment to remember a time not so long ago and far away when the Wachkowskis made a splash with Bound (1996) and The Matrix (1999). Both those movies were sinewy entertainments that remembered to include a bit of the old ultraviolence whenever things threatened to get heavy. Starting with the Matrix sequels, the balance in their films has tipped away from simple thrills towards harebrained grandiosity — these folks put the “magnum” in magnum opus. They’re ambitious enough to fashion mythologies based on humanistic philosophies, adept enough with modern special effects to bring the gee-whiz, and loopy enough to go way, way over the top every single time. Their last project Cloud Atlas (2012), based on the David Mitchell novel, had something to do with how we’re all connected, and represented that New Age ideal by having white actors in yellowface, and vice-versa, which was about as barmy as it gets. Still, in this age of safe cinema, Cloud Atlas was refreshingly human in its folly, and altogether more charming than watching another summer blockbuster disappearing up the backside of its own CGI.
Jupiter Ascending (for a little while at least) holds out hope that the Wachkowskis can maintain their patented mix of sincerity and absurdity. “Tonight the sky is full of miracles,” a character says within the first five minutes, cluing us in that we’re in fairy tale territory, and for our Cinderella, we get Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), a Russian emigre with a tragic backstory and an even more tragic present-day life. Stuck in Chicago with squabbling relatives and toiling away as a maid, she’s a charwoman who needs a Prince Charming to whisk her away. Sure enough, he soon swoops out of that miracle-laden sky — or more accurately, he roller-blades down from above. And he’s not just any roller-blading hero: he’s the hunky Caine (Channing Tatum), a genetic splice of a wolf and human, equipped with pointy ears and gravity boots, like a refugee from the cast of Cats by way of Starlight Express. When he rescues Jupiter from the clutches of some very nasty aliens posing as humans, bouncing like a pinball off hospital walls, it’s a moment just daffy enough to amuse.
Give the Wachkowskis this: They’re not afraid to look campy or silly when they come up with their genre-bending concoctions. Unfortunately, they can no longer leave well enough alone. Instead of settling in for a zippy sci-fi adventure, they feel compelled to bloat the screen with production design that could best be described as baroque anime, a bewildering assortment of aliens, and dialogue so thick that it sticks to the actors’ mouths like glue. It turns out that the universe is one big farm, with the rich turning the poor into nutritious goo to keep themselves immortal; the reveal merges the icky “human beings as batteries” conceit of The Matrix with the “corporatism sucks” message of Speed Racer. Soon Jupiter is genetically confirmed as part of the aristocracy, and finds herself embroiled in political intrigue with her galactic family, including her nasty “son” Balem Abrasax (Eddie Redmayne). At heart, the movie has a message that’s easy to get behind: we must rise above our circumstances, hereditary and otherwise. Too bad that sentiment is overshadowed by mounds of exposition, and buried beneath craziness like Sean Bean as an interstellar cop who is a human-bee hybrid (“Beeswax,” he mutters during a big action scene, and for a moment you wonder if Bean is breaking character and voicing his opinion of this whole affair), and references to everything from Brazil (poor Terry Gilliam even gets a cameo) to Riddick, Flash Gordon, Dune and any other overwrought sci-fi cult film you can name.
Like a bad case of genetic programming, Jupiter Ascending is stuffed with everything: it wants to fry our eyeballs with the worlds and tech on display, as well as warm our hearts with its central love story between Jupiter and her wolf-man protector Caine. (Whether you buy that love story depends on if you can avoid snickering at come-on lines like “Maybe I have defective engineering too.”) The film might reach for the grand lunacy of the movies mentioned above, but as our heroes scuttle to-and-fro around the universe to diminishing effect, Jupiter Ascending‘s refusal to settle down long enough to sketch in a sense of character, situation or stakes torpedoes any chance it has to succeed. It’s ponderous when it should be propulsive, herky-jerk when it should be thoughtful.
While the movie might be all over the map, the performances are all over the universe. Playing the Carrie Ann-Moss Matrix role of kick-ass yet gooey love interest, Tatum somehow emerges with his dignity intact despite the buffed-up satyr look; his distracted goofiness doesn’t qualify as great acting, but given the general tomfoolery, it might be the only sane response. (Kunis can’t even work herself up to look dazed.) On the other end of the spectrum is Redmayne’s campy Balem, whose characterization consists of 90 percent shivery whispers, as if he’s a mad scientist from a ’40s potboiler, and 10 percent shrieking. Balem might scream “I CREATE LIFE!” but the ending is DOA, just another race against time set against explosions and endless scenes of Kunis falling off rooftops and down shafts (Jupiter descending, indeed). Try as they might to tap-dance through the skies like Caine in his gravity boots, the Wachkowskis have become too leaden as filmmakers to create something resembling a sense of wonder. “Free your mind,” Morpheus told Neo in the first Matrix movie; the Wachkowskis have been locked in their minds far too long, and freedom is but a distant memory.
