Jupiter Ascending Review by Tom West
July 5, 2015 7:14 pm | Leave your thoughts
Pop Culture Leftovers Rating System:
Toss It = Hated It
Taste It = Liked It
Tupperware = Loved It
Jupiter Ascending
Directed by; the Wachowskis
Written by; the Wachowskis
Starring; Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Eddie Redmayne and Sean Bean
So, I’ve gone from Ex Machina to Jupiter Ascending, and it’s not really an ascent, or even a straight path from one sci-fi film to another, but a plummet towards total by-the-numbers mediocrity and cliché.
I thought I’d ignore the majority of negative responses, and watch it because it’s sci-fi; the genre that gets a lot of forgiveness from me, and it’s the Wachowskis, whom I admire for their sheer ambition on the Matrix trilogy, but with this… I couldn’t finish it.
I didn’t feel the need to see it out until the end and prolong the grimacing, because it was all so derivative and I’d seen this film a hundred times before, just with different paint jobs.
Mila Kunis was the only principal who bothered with any acting here. Eddie Redmayne was horrendous – he looks a bit like an amphibian, and whispers and whimpers then screams a word for no good reason – as all pathetic villains do in films, and Channing Tatum looked, and sounded, bored.
The effects were similar to Matrix Revolution and Transformers, in that the action was poorly framed and a jumble of metallic noise, and the pilots of spacecraft were forced to use those silly jabbing movements we saw in Revolutions to control the weapons, which would tire you out in no time. You have scenes with the villain falling to his death in a shaft, the opposing bodyguard characters duking it out, with the help of too much CGI and no clear indication of what’s actually happening, the heroine is escaping and -yep – the ladder/ walkway starts peeling away from the main structure, itself being engulfed in a conflagration of fire and death.
It actually started in a fairly promising manner, apart from the awkward prologue about Jupiter’s parents. There’s a nice little appearance from (SPOILER)….
some grayliens, that are sent to abduct and kill Kunis, and they manage to provide some mild creepiness, but it’s all too brief and they soon fall by the wayside as we move into space, and that’s when it goes a bit Flash Gordon, well, very Flash Gordon…
(MORE SPOILERS)…
You have the ET royalty, the over-designed wedding of the earth girl to the space prince, the hero running around the opulent palace shooting guards in cloaks and even a flying spheroid drone. There’s even lizard people, but I don’t think it achieves the camp brilliance that makes Flash Gordon fun and forgivable, and Eddie Redmayne is not a patch on Max Von Sydow.
(LAST SPOILER)…
One character who may have provided unintentional laughter was the elephant-headed, wailing helmsman of Sean Bean and Tatum’s ship, like some Farscape reject. It really made you wonder if you were watching a film by the people who gave us The Matrix and V for Vendetta, but, in hindsight, I think Ele-face could be the best thing about the film.
The plotting and pacing is pretty awful as well, and it’s hard to tell who is working for who, and why this group of humanoids is fighting with another group, which is remarkable for a film were quite a few lines of dialogue are given to exposition. The dialogue seems very quiet compared to the sound effects and music- sound mixing seems a lost art in Hollywood – and Michael Giacchino’s score is intrusive and sub-par, which is surprising given his status as the foremost heir to John Williams.
Overall, It’s pretty woeful. I saw this at home on pay per view, but I really couldn’t be bothered to sit and finish it, even it’s strong on female characters, and Mila Kunis is both a beautiful and talented lead.
I toss it deep into the swirling eye of Jupiter.
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Tags: Channing Tatum, Jupiter Ascending, Mila Kunis, Pop Culture Letovers, Tom West
Categorised in: Movie Reviews
This post was written by Leftover Brian
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