It's derivative as all hell, and yet it's like absolutely nothing that has come around in years: an extravagantly costly effects-driven adventure tailor-made for the narrowest slice of middle-aged genre fanboys. The only recent films to operate in anything like the same mode both tried mightily to distance themselves from all the goofy, juvenile trappings of the genre in different ways: the infamous 2012 flop John Carter by treating everything with crushing solemnity and leaden ponderousness, the 2014 smash hit Guardians of the Galaxy by coating everything in a protective layer of self-mocking irony. No such distance is afforded Jupiter Ascending, which openly loves the corny bullshit it's referencing and wants to bring it to breathtakingly gorgeous life with all of the money the Wachowskis could spirit away from a surprisingly spend-happy Warner Bros. (I have to assume it's this difference - total irony vs. total sincerity - that accounts for GotG receiving critical praise and becoming an enormous financial success, while JA has found only critical scolding and audience indifference, since they're otherwise virtually indistinguishable as exceptionally effective Star Wars knock-offs). It is a film that combines a passionate desire to remain forever 12 years old with the giddy engagement with Big Ideas that is the primary unifying characteristic of the Wachowskis' filmography; it's less the follow-up to their maddeningly under-appreciated Cloud Atlas (a collaboration with Tom Tykwer, which maybe explains the difference) than to their candy-colored pixie stix orgasm Speed Racer with more immediate gratification and a slightly more adolescent than pre-teen worldview.
The story is at once galaxy-spanning and blunt enough that you could write it on a cocktail napkin. The short version: Cinderella in space. Our hero is the aforementioned Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), born in the middle of the ocean while her single mother took her from Russia to the United States after the death of her English father, and now she actually does work as a maid. She's one of the cogs in the family business cleaning rich people's condos in Chicago (indulgent aside: the film makes spectacular use of Chicago's particular architecture and layout - nothing since The Dark Knight itself has been half so good in this respect), mostly stuck with the toilets for added indignation. But she is a Chosen One; the siblings of the unfathomably wealthy Abrasax family, a powerful dynasty of space industrialists, want her for their own reasons. Sister Kalique (Tuppence Middleton) and younger brother Titus (Douglas Booth) both seem to be at least kind of decent about it, but elder brother Balem (Eddie Redmayne), most powerful of the three, is extremely Bad News, with his all-black wardrobe, and his way of menacingly whispering theatrically.
He's the one who throws some terrifying skeletal beasts at her to kill her, from which she's saved by Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a bounty hunter with canid features just pronounced enough to not make Tatum look ugly. At which point we still know nothing, until Cain's earthbound alien friend Stinger (Sean Bean) discovers that she is, improbably, space royalty. Which is still rather more the start of things than the end of them: while it's a complete canard that Jupiter Ascending has a significantly complicated plot (everything important gets repeated, at least once), it does have an awfully overstuffed one, and it can hardly set up Jupiter as the resurrection of the Abrasax materfamilas fast enough to get to its galactic soap opera and dynastic wrangling.
It's neither elegant nor sophisticated, but the rush I, for one, got from following around all the story turns hits exactly the right beats: at its best, it's like a slightly dumber iteration of Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe, at its worst, it's still got the manic "we just escape from something that wants to kill us, but there's something else that wants to kill us even more!" pacing of a trashy adventure, mixed with fairy tale melodrama: one of the two climaxes hinges on a thrilling cross-cut race to interrupt a wedding with a scheming Victorian-style villain. Throughout, the Wachowski's script, and their direction of the actors wielding sometimes unmentionable lines, strikes a tasty mixture of taking itself deadly seriously when it has to for the sake of world-building, but openly and even arrogantly owning up to how very, very silly it can all be. So when the film needs us to believe in its batshit religion of genetics - or at least believe that the characters believe it - it presents reams of crazed technobabble (only Kunis, of the main cast, gets away without having to manage any walls of impenetrable text) with unblinking seriousness and gaping fascination. But when it wants to be a gorgeously over-designed piece of nonsensical eye candy, it can happily pull back and breezily let the movie be loopy fun, and so we get things like the wonderfully choreographed aerial fight over downtown Chicago that ends the film's... first act? Second? It's got a weird number of acts. It's fast paced and zippily edited, but slows down and backs off enough that there's never a point where it's confusing, and it all takes place from dusk to twilight, beautifully captured by cinematographer John Toll.
There are some absolutely unnecessary missteps, including a brutal shift from the first finale into the second, a weird reboot that has the feel of combining a planned sequel into the first film as insurance against not getting to make another one (which turns out to have been wise), and the actors are all over the map, from Redmayne's straight-up '30s matinee serial hamming to Tatum's quiet bafflement (only Bean, out of the whole cast, gives a clear-cut, classically "good" performance). And it's not apologetic for being a gee-whiz bit of fast-paced fluff, which makes it incredibly hard to suggest that it has any business being watched by sensible people who care about depth, weight, and emotions (Exhibit B: the awkward fumbling of everything that has anything to do with the love story between Jupiter and Cain). So I get why somebody would find it intolerably trashy. But set that against the sheer enormousness of its spectacle, its passionate respect for the highest and lowest achievements of its genre, its dazzlingly overwrought visuals, its vigorous post-John Williams score by Michael Giacchino, and I just cannot convince myself that I didn't have an enormous amount of fun.
8/10
Tim, if you were able to enjoy this movie, then I'm happy for you. This was near the top of my Most Anticipated list since the day the first trailer debuted early last year. I unironically love the 1980s Flash Gordon movie and Cloud Atlas was one of my favourite two or three films of the last several years. No-one wanted to love this more than me, but in the end, I couldn't.
ReplyDeleteIt's not that it plays cheesy old pulp sci-fi tropes completely straight, I have no issue with that. Quite the reverse - it saddens me that the film's box office failure will probably put the kibosh on future films of a similar vintage. But there's just so much here that doesn't work at all, on any level. There's the profound incoherence of the screenplay, for one, which progresses through two of the three Abrasax siblings who make their own meager contributions to the plot and then are summarily ejected from the movie, never to be heard from again. There's the total absence of any chemistry in the romantic subplot, partly on account of the unreadable dialogue (the lines about faulty genetics put Ann Hathaway's speech about love in Interstellar into a whole new perspective), partly due to the performances. Mila Kunis seems so over-eager and Channing Tatum so uncomfortable and unresponsive that it becomes faintly embarrassing to watch, like seeing a bubbly college sophomore trying to flirt with a side of prime beef. And then there's whatever the fuck Eddie Redmayne was doing, which I guess was supposed to play as delirious high camp but ended up feeling to me more like plain old Bad Acting.
More fundamentally problematic are Jupiter's passivity throughout the plot - she's shuttled willy-nilly from plot point to plot point, only attaining some measure of agency in the last half-hour or so - and the film's inability to communicate its own stakes. We're told several times that Earth is at risk of being "harvested," but we never see first-hand what the apocalyptic ramifications of that would be. It's just some vague threat the villain has made to do something at some point in the unspecified future, and it's badly disingenuous that Jupiter's family need to be taken hostage in the last act to give the film any sense of urgency. For all its awesome scenery and promises that the future of the universe hangs in the balance, the scope of the story feels weirdly small. Surely at the finale, the battle for dominion over a million worlds should come down to a conflict a bit more stately than a 100-pound girl beating the shit out of Stephen Hawking with a lead pipe?
It is gorgeous. Absolutely, ravishingly, orgasmically gorgeous, the sort of gorgeous that the mightiest, most bleeding-edge Square Enix cutscene couldn't dare dream of, and I don't regret having paid the 3D premium to have seen the vistas it offered. But that really is all that I can muster any enthusiasm for. I have a predilection for the sort of pulp sci-fi tropes that Jupiter Ascending is peddling, but there comes a point where that's not enough to make excuses for bad writing and direction.
See, I actually really liked about it that the conflict felt so low-stakes. The Entire Human Race can only be threatened in so many movies before it starts to feel hollow and boring.
ReplyDeleteMore to the point, surely it's no surprise to anybody who has read this blog for any length of time that "Absolutely, ravishingly, orgasmically gorgeous" matters so much more to me than good, bad, or indifferent writing.
Absolutely, and I myself am not particularly beholden to the idea that plot, dialogue and characterisation are the only or even the primary signifiers of a movie's quality. Suspiria is one of my favourite films, after all. But I do think that if a film is seeking to simply be a series of extraordinary images, then it shouldn't get distracted by the mechanics of a complicated story. My problem is that although I found the writing bad, it's also involved and idiosyncratic enough that the details of the story pulled my attention away from the details of the visuals. To make an obvious comparison, I think Avatar succeeds where Jupiter Ascending fails because its plot is so broad and archetypal that the viewer is able to recognise its beats without really thinking about it, freeing up the rest of their brain to drink in the awesome sights. Jupiter Ascending is broad and archetypal as well, arguably, but it's also full of weird pacing and jarring transitions that can't help but draw attention to themselves, and I was never able to relax into my eye-candy bliss-groove.
ReplyDeleteAs for the scope thing - chalk it up to personal preference, I guess. My complaint would run in the other direction - so many movies pay lip-service to the fate of The Entire Human Race, but fail to actually demonstrate that that's what's at risk.
I haven't run the numbers, but I wonder if this is the largest disparity between Tim & Rotten Tomatoes that has ever been?
ReplyDelete8/10 vs 22%! That's a wide margin!
^He gave an 8/10 to Blackhat and its 29% RT rating too, if we're keeping track of "mostly hated 2015 bombs by auteurs Tim really enjoyed despite all odds"
ReplyDeleteI should be clear: I give the 8/10 way more credence than the 22%, but still, that's a pretty dismally low number.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard for me to rally to put this anywhere near the top of my ever growing watch list with numbers like that.
Somebody wrote a post about this movie that involved the following quote: "Here's the thing about JUPITER ASCENDING, the greatest movie ever made. Is it "good," or is it, more probably, garbage? ... Here is how I feel: it is your garbage. It is garbage for you."
ReplyDeleteBetween the above, your review, and evil-camp Eddie Redmayne, I can no longer in good faith *not* throw my money at this creation.
The all-time champ is probably Babylon A.D., which I gave a 6 when it had a RT score of, like 4%.
ReplyDeleteRiley- That is a quote I totally and unhesitatingly endorse.
The few times I have seen 3d movies, there always have been amazing trailers, in this case, The Walk, quite awesome.
ReplyDeleteI kinda liked Babylon AD, kinda; it had some nice performances and a few fine action sequences (and its critical crucifixion remains inexplicable to me). Sadly, I canNOT say the same for Jupiter Ascending. I'm surprised that you found the story so easily comprehensible, because for me it was like trying to see the sailboat in a Magic Eye picture which was been cut up and rearranged into a jigsaw puzzle. With all square identically-sized pieces. And then half of those pieces were fed to a dog with a bad stomach infection, digested, processed, excreted, and then slapped right the fuck back into the puzzle as if nothing happened. NONE of this made any damn sense to me whatsoever, from the ridiculous opening scene to the boring halfway point when I finally walked out.
ReplyDeleteLike, take the first big action scene, the one where Channing Tatum fights the three bounty hunters. We're tossed into this stroboscopic blur of a video-game cutscene without having practically ANY exposition, backstory, or motivation explained to us. Who are these people? What is their bounty? What are they fighting over? What are the stakes? Why should we care? What are their specific powers and abilities, the "rules" of what they can and can't do? Heck, which ones are the good guys or the bad guys? Who are we supposed to be cheering? None of this is helped by the fact that we can't even see Tatum's face, making me give not the tiniest shit about what's going on or who wins this fight.
The most galling thing is, that sort of thing can actually be done well. I know this for a fact, cuz the Wachowskis did exactly that in the opening of the Matrix, with Trinity taking on the cops and Agent Smith. We don't really know who these people are, why they're fighting, why Trinity can break the laws of physics or Smith can break them even more; but in this case, those mysteries are fascinating instead of frustrating. It's clearly indicated that Smith is an emotionless baddie, Trinity is a plucky underdog who is very capable but still frightened nearly to the point of paralysis by her implacable opponent, and the poor-schmuck cops are all just lambs to the slaughter and pawns in a larger game that they never get to see. It's all told very clearly with admirable efficiency, and yet the same directors do absolutely none of the above in Jupiter Ascending.
In fact, let's go back to those poor-schmuck cops for a minute. Why are the Wachowskis almost always so damn'd callous towards the spear-carriers and innocent bystanders who wind up as collateral damage in their huge action scenes? The Matrix was bad enough with its "kill every cop you see, they're not real people anyway" subtext, but Jupiter Ascending tops that by giving us all these huge explodeydope spectacles in which hundreds if not thousands of people presumably die, but we never actually see those people nor their deaths, and then they're never even referenced again. Like in the big Attack Of The Clones-ripoff chase scene through the Chicago skyline, where both good and bad guys are blowing up buildings left and right and presumably massacring a 9/11-sized number of persons. They don't even have the Avengers-style fig leaf of saying "well, the buildings were empty, everyone was evacuated" because at one point we see them blowing up a whole El train which is currently trundling down the tracks. Uh, excuse me guys (whoops, sorry, guy and now-a-girl), but maybe you wanna have even so much as Michael Bay's blink-and-you'll-miss-it level of regard and regret for all the human lives being summarily ended here?
ReplyDeleteAdd that to shitty background music, shitty performances from everyone except Kunis (seriously, what the FUCK Eddie Redmayne, that was some "John Travolta in Battlefield Earth" bullshit acting right there), shitty handling of garbled exposition which is hurled at us in split-second chunks of incomprehensible technobabble between overacting aliens with the worst type of stupid phony names that exemplifies the worst traits of brainless speculative fiction, and overall I'm kinda shocked that Tim liked it. Yeah, the visuals were pretty, but they weren't Avatar-pretty, and they would need to be Avatar-pretty (and Avatar at least had one bad actor surrounded by a great supporting cast, instead of the other way around) in order for me to swallow this load. Overall the experience of trying to watch this film felt like I was watching John Carter Of Mars, with all its special effects shots arbitrarily replaced with the CGI images from Tron Legacy, and then the entire audio track for Dune was dubbed over the original sound.
Considering I loved Speed Racer (though not as much as Cloud Atlas), I'm fucking delighted to hear that there's just as little compromise here.
ReplyDeleteTim, I remember in your Cloud Atlas review that you were tempted to revisit Speed Racer. Did you ever actually do that?
I want to only add that by the time the "dogs" line (you know the one) came up, I became breathless from laughing so hard until I cried. It was a moment of blissful rapture, and if it's not The Best Line of 2015 by the end of the year, then God help me.
ReplyDeleteWow, I finally saw this last night and I am totally with you on this one, Tim. Steve and I both had a blast with it. The good stuff is genuinely exciting; the bad stuff is, mostly, intentionally and unintentionally entertaining. Not sure what Redmayne was up to but it made me chuckle. I can understand the WTF reactions by a lot of folks (it is amazing a big studio would throw so much cash at this kind of craziness), but I don't get the vitriol. Even the reactions here are practically hostile as if people are angry you would even dare to enjoy this film! As for the film being callous towards civilians, I didn't get that at all and I was feeling very sensitive about that very issue having just seen Kingsman, which has a downright toxic in that regard.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, we loved it. How about that Giacchino score? A thing of beauty.