Review: Jupiter Ascending

Wow. Just wow. I don't think I've ever seen so much money ploughed into something quite so ridiculous in my entire life. It managed to make Flash Gordon look clever, to make Adaptation look coherent, to make Men in Black look deep.

Let me just sum up the plot for a second. Mila Kunis plays a woman who cleans toilets for a living. She hates her life until aliens try to kill her while donating eggs in a fertility clinic. Fortunately, she is rescued by an alien werewolf space ranger with anti-gravity roller skates. Seriously, I am not making this up.

I enjoyed it. I wouldn't watch it again, but I enjoyed it in the way I enjoy watching crappy B movies and poorly made sci-fi with rubber headed aliens. At it's core, the problem with Jupiter rising is that it doesn't know what it is. It mixes political intrigue with space opera with family drama with fantasy escapism with Gilliamesque comedy steampunk and as a result has no time to develop any of these. I could tell there was a problem three minutes into the film. As an audience, we need to be informed how to watch a film. Are we expecting whimsy, gritty realism, fantasy, comedy? The first three minutes of Jupiter rising set up a gentle, philosophical romance: Jupiter's parents meeting in Russia, bonding over his love of astronomy, gently teasing each other about his desire to name their child after a planet. Then a bunch of gangsters break into their apartment and he is shot. No build up, no hint that this sort of thing happens in their neighourhood, no explanation as to why they might have been targeted. The mood whips from soft focus and romantic lighting to hard hitting drama, then suddenly we are in Chicago, and Jupiter and her mother are working as cleaners, may also be illegal immigrants, and the mood switches to downbeat urban slice of life.

Given this confusion of genre, its no surprise that the plot is equally confused, the antagonists and protagonists difficult to distinguish, and the characters impossible to root for. By the time we hit full on sci fi mode – an attempt to cross Dune and Star Wars which simply came across as actors playing dress up - I found myself not really caring what happened to any of them. If I didn't know better, I'd say the Wachowski siblings had a big box of movie cliches and were pulling them out of a hat one after another and challenging the other to write them.

I could go on at length as to why this movie didn't work. Instead, I should devote some time to what did work. The acting was good, the cast impressive. Eddie Redmayne made the most of what he had, Sean Bean was the most Yorkshire alien around, and Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum gave good action scenes, even if the love interest bit seemed a little forced.

If you've got nothing better to do, or are drunk enough to not care about plot, I'd say give the movie a go. It's got explosions, and pretty visuals, and you can play buzzword bingo everytime they use a phrase that makes a scientist in a lab somewhere cringe (I particular enjoyed 'genetic reincarnation').

But don't expect it to be good, snappy, or clever. For that I recommend Flash Gordon.