On Jupiter did Abrasax a Stately Pleasure-Dome Decree

Jupiter Ascending

Directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski

One Star

By Rollan Schott

You've got to hand it to the Wachowski siblings. They've got brass. Lesser filmmakers would merely have made "Jupiter Ascending" a decent motion picture. But that would have been wrong. A failure this spectacular requires vision. It requires reach. The Wachowskis know that a catastrophe of this breadth and magnitude is not to be committed to half-heartedly.



So yes. "Jupiter Ascending" is a spectacular failure of a movie, a chaotic and impenetrable regurgitation of light and sound that will no doubt be the last thing ever witnessed by many unfortunate epileptics. But to be offended by its dizzying mindlessness is probably to deprive yourself the modest joys of a good ol' fashioned, preening train wreck of a space opera. These don't come along every day. Take what you can get.

The story, which, for the sake of argument, I am generously conceding that "Jupiter Ascending" has, involves a rather hapless, if spry, young woman named Jupiter (Mila Kunis), whose titular ascent is provoked when one of a squabbling trio of celestial dynastic siblings issues a bewildering order for her assasination. Jupiter is a cleaning lady, still living with her poor family, who operate basically as a commune of other cleaning ladies and boorish men in track suits. Many of these relationships go unexplained or are otherwise totally superfluous. One of them bought a television.

The hit is intercepted by a rogue bounty hunter named Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), scooting about on a pair of hovering roller blades, who rescues Jupiter and sweeps her away on an intergalactic odyssey, wherein she discovers the greater civilization of the human race. It is in these early scenes of exposition that "Jupiter Ascending" will strain the credulity of even its most accommodating observers.

Without giving too much away, the human race is at least a billion years old, incredibly advanced but still recognizably patriarchal, tribal, vain, and juvenile, and has colinized pretty much the entire universe (Including the planet of jupiter, not only the least hospitable of the planets in our solar system but also within the radius of our furthest space cameras) The principle industry of the moneyed elite is the seeding of hospitable planets all over the universe with our own species for the puproses of an ominous "harvest", spoken of early and explained long after it is already apparent. This harvest is the occupation of the wealthiest "entitled" family in the universe, the three rival Abrasax siblings, whose political maneuvering involves a great deal of sitting alone in ornate halls and staring into corners.

The transpermia narrative is possibly designed to work as an allegory for climate change. Fleeting mention is made of the species' outpacing of its planet's output of resources signalling that a planet is ready to be "harvested". And of course it is humans themselves who administer their own extermination, so it's like man-made climate change is a self-inflicted extinction. Or something. I tried.

Lest we lose our perspective, this convoluted plot is little more than a backdrop for the film's wealth of delerious and unintelligable CGI action scenes. It is not to be taken seriously. This is a gleefully senseless film, so washed out with computer generated excess and hyperactive editing as to render its stars effectively unnecessary for huge swaths of the proceedings. I believe that if "Jupiter Ascending" were a better film, it would be terribly cynical. The disparity, between the amount of time and effort that clearly went into these production designs, and the total sum of images actually worth looking at, is immense.

I suspect that "Jupiter Ascending" will be remembered primarily as a formal experiment to determine the number of times in two hours that a potentially sinister turn of events can be averted at the last possible moment by a white guy. But I have to admit, I was a little bit impressed by the gusto with which this goes about the business of being a horrible movie. I certainly can't say I was bored. Nor terribly offended. Bewildered, maybe. None of this makes a damn bit of sense. But hover blades? Come on.