Jupiter Ascending Review

Everything about the film Jupiter Ascending is beautiful.

The dazzling visual effects are beautiful.

Mila Kunis is beautiful.

Half wolf man Channing Tatum is beautiful.

Eddie Redmayne...well, no, Eddie Redmayne isn't beautiful. His character is weird and his performance is weirder. Also, it's bad. His performance is real bad. A part of me doesn't really blame him though because obviously the work he did here was acceptable to the filmmakers. They saw what was happening, hell they may have even asked him to portray it exactly this way. I can't imagine why because it was ridiculous, but for them to roll with it means it clearly somehow fit into their vision. 

The script isn't beautiful either. It's a few other B words. Baffling. Balderdash. What's the other one?

Oh right. Bad. The script is bad too.

Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum and those visuals though? Beautiful. Yep, just keep thinking about those aspects and trick myself into believing I really enjoyed Jupiter Ascending. Think about all of those beautiful things...

Nope, can't do it. I can't deny those other B words. There is just too much bad present in Jupiter Ascending to love it. Here's the thing though: despite this, my conflicted but optimistic relationship with the Wachowskis allowed me to still technically enjoy the experience of watching this film as for whatever reason I admire their ambitions and the spectacle they put on. These are the wonderful, bold cinematic minds behind The Matrix and the stunning adaptation of Cloud Atlas, two films comfortably resting in my top 100 of all time, yet for some reason they also craft such strange misfires as well. Perhaps that is just the down side of having big ideas and being so passionate about them, that sometimes they hit all the right notes and we can feel the love they have for their work in every frame and other times it seems like they were just throwing shit at the wall and pieces of it refused to stick.

Jupiter Ascending tells the story of a girl named Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) who seemingly was born destined for greatness yet nothing about her life feels great, which is rather appropriate for a movie that is so gorgeous to look at and yet lacks any semblance of a meaningful narrative capable of elevating it. 

Jupiter finds out that she was right all along, that her existence is far more important than her current state of affairs as she is genetically marked as royalty and is next in line to claim her inheritance which is the right to own a distant planet. On paper the story seems kind of interesting: it isn't. It's really uninspired and does nothing to grab hold of me emotionally in any way, despite obvious efforts to do so. 

In the end, Jupiter Ascending is a lot of beautiful and a lot of bad. I choose to be a glass-half-full kinda guy and think more about the beautiful.

3/5