If nothing else, “Jupiter Ascending” offers viewers a wealth of imagery they have probably never seen before.
The sight of a frosted-blond Channing Tatum, in eye shadow and leather biker gear, hoofing through the air in a pair of glowing rocket boots as a mass of alien infrastructure explodes around him. The boots allow him to glide like a hockey player on the ice, and he rides them with an expression of almost comically fierce determination. When he moves, he looks like an Olympic speedskater having a bowel movement.
Which is also more or less how I felt while sitting in the audience.
“Jupiter Ascending” is a spectacular mess of a movie, often more mess than spectacle, with an utterly incoherent plot and poorly drawn main characters. The writing is crude and often blunt to the point of hilarity. Several of the lead performances are memorably awful.
Yet the movie’s grand ambitions, combined with its wild designs and surfeit of fantastical sci-fi ideas, make for a more interesting failure than most of what gets shoveled into the multiplex this time of year.
The movie’s ambitions as well as its awfulness can be pinned squarely on its writer-director duo, siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski, the pair behind “The Matrix” and its sequels.
“Jupiter Ascending” bears many of the same elements employed in those films, although it does execute them as successfully. There are gravity-defying action sequences, villains with shiny hair and tailored clothing who laboriously monologue their cruel intentions like “Scooby-Doo” villains with grad school degrees, and mind-bending visuals and gorgeous sci-fi scenery. The sensibility appears drawn equally from comic books and obscure philosophy texts.
Of course, there is a heroine: Jupiter Jones, an immigrant housekeeper played with doe-eyed blandness by Mila Kunis. Like Neo from “The Matrix,” she is a chosen one — a queen of the universe, though at first she doesn’t know it. She discovers her good fortune when Caine Wise, the rocket-boot shod operative — part man, part wolf — played by Mr. Tatum, shows up to save her from a far nastier group of hunters in rakish, Mad Max-inspired leatherwear and high-tech gizmos.
After a series of violent encounters, Caine rescues Jupiter from her hunters, and the pair end up in space where Jupiter must navigate a maze of intergalactic bureaucracy. It’s the movie’s best sequence, a Terry Gilliam-esque detour filled with weird details, arresting designs and funny characters (including a cameo by Mr. Gilliam).
The sequence suggests the better film that “Jupiter Ascending” could have been. It’s also completely mismatched with the rest of the movie, which is far more serious and conventional in its approach to space opera.
After dispensing with the bureaucrats, Jupiter moves on to dealing with the intergalactic aristocracy — a trio of ultrarich siblings with penchants for detailing their villainous plans at length. The worst of the bunch, by far, is the psychopathic corporate overlord Balem, played by Eddie Redmayne with a breathy, campy spirit more likely to stir a giggle than a shudder.
Even beyond Mr. Redmayne’s ludicrous performance, the movie is never short on ridiculousness. The Wachowskis insert a dopey anti-capitalist sentiment into the proceedings, which is hard to buy not only because it’s presented so stupidly, but also because it is delivered in the form of a $175 million Hollywood blockbuster.
Granted, it’s one that was delayed from a planned prime summer release after initial test screenings proved disastrous. It’s hard to fathom what could have convinced a studio executive that a movie as belligerently strange as this one eventually would have mass commercial appeal.
On the other hand, the movie’s existence and the size of its budget do more than anything in the story or script to prove the Wachowskis right that the capitalists have no idea what they are doing.
TITLE: Jupiter Ascending
CREDITS: Written and directed by the Wachowskis
RATING: PG-13 for sci-fi violence
RUNNING TIME: 127 minutes
Please read our comment policy before commenting.