Imagine if you will a crossover between Star Wars and Game of Thrones. Congratulations, you have just thought of a much more intriguing and exciting movie than Jupiter Ascending. The Wachowskis have attempted to craft an engaging sci-fi story and, while I must admit the world the movie inhabits is interesting, they lack the writing ability to make a story that is engaging or one that makes any sense.
Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is an illegal Russian immigrant who lives in Chicago working for her uncle in his cleaning business. In an attempt to make some money by selling her eggs, she is almost killed by aliens (the most stereotypic aliens you can think of), but is saved by Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a human-dog hybrid, who reveals to Jupiter that Earth was genetically seeded by a family run corporation billions of years ago. Jupiter finds out that she is actually space royalty (the highest royalty one can hope for) and is thrust into the politics of the Abrasax family, which includes Balem (Eddie Redmayne), Kalique (Tuppence Middleton) and Titus (Douglas Booth), all of whom are fighting over the ownership of Earth.
This movie's plot is all over the place and that has to do with the amount of detail which is just brushed over. We have no idea about where the space people came from (they do identify as human) or how their civilisation works. It is mentioned that the Abrasax family is one of many that inhabit the universe, but we never get a glimpse at any of these. On the upside we do get an extended montage of "space bureaucracy" that is trying so hard to remind us of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. In the hands of a much better writer, this world would be an amazing setting for a series of sci-fi novels that would be able to go into the deep detail needed for all this plot.
There is also a glaring problem with Jupiter's backstory. In the prologue, we are told that Jupiter's father was the son of the British Ambassador to Russia and her mother and father live in quite a nice apartment. But in the scene that comes after her father's death, her mother is on a container ship, being smuggled into America. So many things wrong here. Why wouldn't the father-in-law take them in? Being an ambassador is quite a revered diplomatic position and he couldn't have ensured their safe passage anywhere in the world. Even if he disowned them, Jupiter's mother had enough money to be able to get to America. Sure the prologue takes place in Soviet Russia, but the way they were living exceeded the middle class of Russia at the time.
As for the acting of this film, I don't really know what to say. All the actors do an adequate job of portraying their one-dimensional characters. Jupiter had the potential to be a strong female protagonist, but just ends up being another damsel to be saved by Channing Tatum. Now his character is just as boring. We know nothing of the science behind the character, although they mention gene-splicing more times that I care to count. And Sean Bean. Don't even get me started on him. We all know he is good for one thing and one thing only; dying. And yet they don't let him live up to his potential. What a waste.
There is hope, however. Very recent Academy Award Winner Eddie Redmayne has made some incredible, if not strange, acting choices in his career. But none have been as genius as the choices made in this film. He looked at the poorly written Balem Abrasax and his minimal screen time and wondered how could he work his magic. Well, magic is the right word for it. In each scene, he mumbles through his lines, making you lean in to grasp the nuances of his delivery of each line, before shouting at all of us the crux of each scene, which nine out of ten times is "Bring her to me!" or a variant thereof.
I really wish this was a series of books because I would enjoyed it. Too late now. The only thing saving this from a zero score is Redmayne's strange, weird performance. The only character I want to see ever again is the elephant man Nesh. If you've seen it, you'll agree with me.
