Oh dear, Jupiter Ascending. I went into this on the promise that it was a hilarious mess, and hey, at least one word of that is correct. The film has spawned something of a cult audience, due largely to it appealing to a female demographic in a way that the genre usually does for male demographics. Were there more (and better) films which appealed to this demographic, then the cult audience for Jupiter Ascending would probably be half the size, because the film is simply awful.
Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is a member of a Russian (imigrant?) family, whose father is a space alien apparently. One day, she's attacked by other space aliens, and saved by a human space alien: Cain, played by Channing Tatum. Turns out Jupiter is some sort of royalty. We learn this because apparently the bees know and thus she can make them fly gracefully around her hands. This movie is nuts. That description of the main plot heavily streamlines the setup, and doesn't even get into the reasons behind the main conflict. There's so much going on in Jupiter Ascending that it makes The Amazing Spider-Man 2 look organized and sedate. Unlike the latter film, however, Jupiter Ascending is almost entirely incoherent, tossing out so many ideas and plot threads that it's nearly impossible to keep track of them all in one sitting. Character motivations boil down to "I want to own the planet Earth", but they're often poorly explained, and one particular antagonist, Douglas Booth's Titus Abrasax, had such poorly-explained motives that it took me some time to realize he was the bad guy. In fact, there's so much thrown at you that the miserable dialogue, which never raises above the level of "Bees don't lie," barely even registers by the halfway point.
This wouldn't be quite so bad if the ideas were good, but a lot of them really aren't. Jupiter Ascending is chock-full of bizarre decisions in not only its script, but also its makeup. There's almost nothing in the way of consistency among the alien species, with only three showing more than one specimen. This isn't necessarily a problem, given that the predominant species across the film is humanity, who apparently originated on some other planet and wiped out the dinosaurs while colonizing earth, but it shows a distinct lack of thematic consistency or creative oversight when it appears that the art designers just threw in every design that came to mind. A lot of the aliens aren't especially well-designed either, being effectively lame human variations, greys, and lizard men. Still, the inane changes made to said human variations to make them look more extraterrestrial are often strange, at least until you get used to aliens not necessarily being any specific species but just being there to be there.
Meanwhile, the film can technically be described as "science fiction", but it nails neither of those elements. Nowhere is the intersection of bad science and bad fiction more obvious than in the ideas about genetics. Get this: According to Jupiter Ascending, when a person is born with the same genes as another person, that child is the reincarnation of the former person. The funny thing about the genetic obsession of the film and its society is that it has absolutely no clue how genes work, and even if it is correct in some of its ideas (though obviously not the one previously stated), the way they're explained in the movie makes them sound like complete gibberish.
If nothing else, though, at least the technology design was cool, if often nonsensical in its function. The ships in particular are especially well-designed, and look great with the film's pretty CGI. I watched the movie in 3D, and the effect is solid enough, though I'm unsure if it warrants the extra ticket price. However, for all the flashy CGI effects, the action scenes never have the impact they should. They go on too long and don't keep track of location well, and have a certain feeling of hollowness to them that comes from the choreography being rote and not particularly inventive. In the best action films, the fight scenes connect for one of two reasons: Either the carnage is potent, or the fight choreography is impressive and interesting. Neither is true here, rendering the very high quantity of action unable to compensate for Jupiter Ascending's faults.
Acting, meanwhile, is blandly mediocre at best and laughably bad at worst. The villains are incredibly campy, especially Eddie Redmayne as Balem Abrasax, who whispers most of his lines, except for the ones which he screams at the top of his lungs. It's apparent that, faced with such a poor script, he decided to just have fun with the role, especially considering that he won an Oscar for his previous role in The Theory of Everything. It's an immense step down, though no less engaging.
Oh, and did I mention that there's a trite non-romance? Because of course there is.
There were several moments in Jupiter Ascending where I would've left the movie theatre if I weren't reviewing the movie. At least one reviewer chose to just recap the whole film in place of a proper review, and he's not necessarily wrong in doing so: The film speaks for itself. Sure, it might technically be "original", but this inanity is not the sort of originality that warrants genuine praise. It's a nonsensical mess filled with bad ideas that fails in the basic task of immersing viewers properly in its illusion.
In other words, it's a disaster.
2/10
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