Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis (Murray Close/Warner Bros.)
Jupiter Jones is conflicted. Her father was a man who always tried to see the best in people, but she’s someone who only sees the worst. I try to see the best in bad movies, and with my track record, I’m pretty sure I will see a worse movie than Jupiter Ascending this year. The movie is not without ideas, but those ideas are slapped around in the agitator setting of the incoherent rinse cycle of the Wachowski’s big budget sci-fi mess. The worst thing about it is that it’s not as much fun as it should be.
Mila Kunis plays Jupiter Jones, a Russian cleaning woman with interplanetary royal blood. Apart from fitting her with latex gloves, the filmmakers make no attempt to deglamorize Kunis as she plies her humble trade, but her Russian family (now living in Chicago) look like Brighton Beach regulars while Kunis stands out like an alien among them. Jupes has never gotten over the fact that, before she was born, her father was murdered by Russian thieves who stole his brass telescope. One day she’s trawling eBay, and, incomprehensibly passing over dozens of private press records that can be had for a song, eyes a brass telescope that would cost her four grand. She can’t make that on a cleaning woman’s salary, so she decides to sell her eggs to raise the money, and checks into a fertility clinic unaware that her doctors are actually extraterrestrial dragons sent by Balem Abrasax (Eddie Redmayne) who want her dead because she’s the spitting image of his mother and He Hates His Mother.
But her hero is on the way, in the form of Channing Tatum’s Caine Wise (parse out that name for a second), who’s a genetically modified human “spliced” with a dog. This pointy-eared albino puppy flies about on gravity boots that leave a trail of light behind him as if he’s surfing on blue sunshine.
I’ve just described a movie that may have come out of the imagination of a fevered adolescent, but I haven’t even gotten to the part about Jupiter being a queen from another planet, which they discover when Stinger Apini (Sean Bean), who’s part man, part bee, notices the swarm of bees in thrall of their queen. Because, as you know, “bees are genetically designed to recognize royalty.”
This may sound like a great, insane movie. But it never comes together. Its leads are attractive enough that fans may be happy to watch them reading or bench-pressing the phonebook, and if Kunis gets by just looking pretty, Tatum fares less well. He’s a well-paid actor not because he can lose himself in his characters, but because his characters are basically him, at least in movies like Step Up and Foxcatcher.
It’s not Tatum’s fault that he can’t get into the character of an albino puppy man from another planet, because I’m sure his natural cadence has nothing to do with the stilted mythic hero that the Wachowski’s force him into. The Wachowski’s so totally fail their actors that they make a pair of English actors—Douglas Booth and Tuppence Middleton—seem like their British accents are *bad.* Eddie Redmayne is another story altogether, his slow, villainous whisper being singled out for so much derision that odds-makers worry that blowback from this performance may harm his Oscar chances. He’s hammy, but not hammy enough for this “space opera.”
Still, I said there are ideas here, and there are. Jupiter fights Balem for control of the Earth, whose people have been harvested to make an elixir that promises eternal youth. The central metaphor is that humans are harvested to buy time, a commodity like the eggs that Jupiter wanted to sell to buy a telescope. A potentially amusing scene follows Jupiter as she tries to navigate an alien bureaucracy in order to stake her claim as owner of Earth.
Anyone who works for The Man may not be surprised to find the bureaucrats of an advanced civilization using outdated equipment, and when you see an alien power system that funds human harvesting for the elite while neglecting the front lines, well I guess that’s just Life on Another Planet.
The movie ends on a note of Jupiter finding a newfound appreciation for her modest life, except that it’s a mixed message because she happens to be Queen of Earth. I didn’t hate Jupiter Ascending, but I can’t even recommend it as a fun bad movie, just a big mess that’s overcooked and undercooked at the same time.
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Written and directed by The Wachowskis
With Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Eddie Redmayne, Sean Bean.
Rated PG-13 for some violence, sequences of sci-fi action, some suggestive content and partial nudity.
Running time 125 long minutes
Opens today at theaters everywhere.
