Saw Jupiter Ascending: Liked It (Boxed Spoilers only)

Cafe Society
1

I saw Jupiter Ascending today, have WANTED to see it since last summer when it was SUPPOSED to premiere. It’s a fun space opera, with plenty of eye-popping special effects, an original and interesting story, and all kinds of fun shout-outs to other SF franchises. In short, it is what movie scientists call “a hoot.” Not a movie to be taken seriously, but an enjoyable movie that doesn’t leave you with that kind of flat aftertaste that comic book movies usually do.

The biggest flaw, I found, was that it was too long and had too many slambang action packed chase/fights. It could have cut out one or two of the chase/fights and been a better movie.

Now there were some interesting elements to the plot, which I’ll spoiler box because they’re definitely big-time spoilers.

[spoiler]I said the movie was interesting and original and it is, but it isn’t hard to figure out from whence the Wachowskis drew some of their material. See if this plot doesn’t sound familar: “Little young nobody Earth woman (she’s a maid who cleans toilets for a living) suddenly finds herself being fought over by werewolves and vampires.”

Yes, like 50 Shades of Gray it’s inspired by “Twilight” but where 50 Shades filed the serial numbers off and changed the names and locations to protect the guilty, “Jupiter Ascending” filed off EVERYTHING but the serial numbers and replaced it with a giant honking space disintegrator rifle. The werewolf is a human-wolf genetic hybrid that didn’t quite work out, the space vampires are INTERSTELLAR space vampires, who don’t drink blood but distill “Time” or essence of immortality from human bodies, and Earth is just one of the many, many planets in their galactic empire (which is just one of several powerful empires in the galaxy, including probably a host of less powerful galactic empires).

And the romance angle, while definitely part of the story, is not all that dominant, the movie is basically an action space opera, with plenty of stuff being blowed up big-time at breakneck speeds, with exposition in the lulls to explain why who is blowing up stuff big-time at breakneck speeds.

And the Wachowski’s gleefully graft whatever seems fun into their movie: there’s a little bit of steampunk, a character straight out of anime, dragon men, mouse men, birdmen, cyborgs, little grey aliens and just one long string of whatnot, I’m sure I missed a lot (see breakneck pace).[/spoiler]

The major flaw of the movie was that it was too long and had too many breakneck action scenes, I was getting kinda tired of them toward the end. It would have been a better movie, I think, if they’d cut out some of the action and made it twenty minutes shorter (it runs about 2 hours 10 minutes I think). But overall, it was a romp, I had fun, what can I say, I like galactic space operas. I recommend it. But be warned, I also liked “Prometheus” a lot the first time I saw it and though it’s still a fun thing to watch in the background, I’ve had to acknowledge that there’s not a lot of intelligence in that movie and so it’s not a movie that bears thinking about.

However, “Jupiter Ascending” is not a movie to take seriously, it’s a romp, pure fun. I think the Wachowskis have creating an interesting and fun universe to set some stories in, I hope their will be sequels. We shall see.

2

Rotten Tomatoes only gave it 22% positive.

3

It’s not a great movie by any means, but it’s pretty fun if you go in knowing what to expect. (Epic, schlocky space opera from the 1930s but with better special effects.)

ETA: And Terry Gilliam being Terry Gilliam.

4

Agreed, and I can’t wait until the RiffTrax comes out. :wink:

5

I plan to see it next week, I’ve enjoyed their other films despite them getting poor reviews. Cloud Atlas was a masterpiece,

6

I liked it. Not amazing, but still a fun romp.

Space DMV was my favorite scene.

7

Complete with Space Sassy Black Woman. :stuck_out_tongue:

8

Ugh. Hated it. I just wanted to bitch-slap MIla Kunis for the entire film. Other than the Twilight fiasco, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie where the female lead has no logic or rational thoughts beyond her immediate surroundings. Thank goodness she’s cute.

9

Your complaint about Kunis’ character was echoed by my wife.

“Shouldn’t she just take a minute and think about what she’s doing instead of agreeing to sign every document she’s given, marry every man who proposes, and generally do whatever stupid thing anyone wants her to?”

10

Your wife is a wise, wise woman, Evil Captor. :smiley:

11

This could have been amazing. Instead it was an entertaining click with some serious plot holes.

I enjoyed the world they created but in the hands of a good writer this universe could have some serious legs I believe.

12

And yet, she married me. I guess she learned that lesson!

13

I probably would have enjoyed it were I a 13-year-old girl, but since I am not, I found it a bit tedious.

14

Hey, all the Brazil (my favorite film) homages, including Terry Gilliam himself as a nasty beaurucrat AND a reference to “27B/6” plus Chicago being beautiful, getting blowed up, then being beautiful again, was sure worth a matinee price to my husband and me. Plus, even though I haven’t seen and have no intention of seeing 50 Shades of Grey, just from what I’ve seen and read, JA seems much more romantic.

15

Just a CGI-fest, great if you like space battles, and I do. The story, such as it was, was a mishmash of pieces stolen from other things, with no attention to coherence. I got Dune, Babylon 5, The Matrix, Astroboy, Barbarella, Star Wars, Superman, The Matrix, Cinderella (of course) and The Graduate, in addition to the above.

16

To quote Roger Ebert, that sounds like an explosion at the genre factory.

17

Well, to me, “explosion at the genre factory” denotes a movie that is made by people who are just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, with no real coherence. Most of the bits that are cited here are very subtle elements of the movie, so much so that you can easily miss them … more homages than crude add-ons. The only part that really seemed tacked-on and unnatural is the one that a couple of people have cited as one of their favorite elements: the steampunk imagery in the DMV was waaaaaaay off from the rest of the movie visually, and made very little sense.

18

It sure made sense to anyone who’s seen Brazil. If people haven’t seen Brazil and so that part didn’t make sense or seem to fit, that’s their loss, Brazil being a brilliant movie and all, and, as the Wachowski siblings would no doubt be the first to agree, a much, MUCH better movie than Jupiter Ascending. Brazil itself was very dark and serious with flashes of seemingly nonsensical whimsical moments.

19

One of my favorite characters is Advocate Bob (played by Samuel Barnett), who takes Jupiter around the “DMV” to get her Princess papers in order. On this page (you have to scroll down) is a bit about how he was done that I found interesting. I thought all the special effects were great, and it kept a lot of artists and technicians busy for a long time.

Picture of Advocate Bob.

Picture of Terry Gilliam as the “Seal and Signet Minister”.

20

Saw this last night with MilliCal. After the bad reviews, I thought the theater would be almost deserted, but, no, it was almost full, even for the 9:30 PM show. My thoughts:

1.) Those critics who called this “muddled” obviously weren’t paying attention. The plot is pretty clear and straightforward, with decent spaced revelations and enoughintriguing SF/Fantasy ideas to nudge it along.

2.) I was disappointed at how many common tropes from SF and fantasy got trotted out. Even though a lot of them haven’t been used (at least not much) in cinema, they’re familiar enough that a lot of this feels like retread:

a.) The Animal People – Channing Tatum as Caine Wise (“Wise Canine”?) the wolf-man who ends up with wings; Sean Bean as Stinger Apini (Really? Stinger??? And “Apini” as in apes = bees), the bee-man, and we get a deer-man, and what looks like a weasel-man, and a couple of mouse-girls, and an elephant man. “He’s going to be named Ganesh”, I said. Close enough – he’s named Nesh. The Animal People could’ve been taken from Cordwainer Smith or L. Frank Baum (or Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, or the musical of it), or Jack Kirby’s Kamandi or Og knows where else.

b.) The Future Galactic Empire is Ruled by an Aristocracy – as in Frank Herbert’s Dune or Jerry Pournelle’s future, or Poul Anderson’s Ensign Flandry series, or, again, Og knows how many others L. Sprague de Camp got sick of such Graustarkian Titles so much by the 1950s that in his Science Fiction Writer’s Handbook he called for a moratorium on them. But then they came back with a vengeance – Lord Vader, anyone? At least the three people playing the corrupt and decadent Abrasax family (from Abraxas, presumably – “Abrasax” is actually a variant form of “Abraxas”, a Gnostic term with multiple meanings, including a kind of god, which seems appropriatye here. They’re wonderfully smarmy, with one talking so softly that he’s clearly making things hard for his retinue on purpose, and you want to hit them all. Oddly, Tuppence Templeton as Kalique (Yeah, they’re all given godlike first names, too) really isn’t given much to do, aside from demonstrating their near-immortality and rejuvenation. You really have to wonder about the Wachowskis in this one. After their earlier films devoted to showing equality of sexes and races, the women come off kinda badluy in this one, with Kalique disappearing early on, and not even getting to be as evil as her brothers, while Mila Kunis’ Jupiter, despite being a quick study in Abrasax Law, still seems to make vapid decisions, and has to be rescued over and over. The only woman who seems in control is the captain of the Aegis. (Yes, they really named the ship that shields them after the mythical shield of Zeus and Athena.)

In fact, it’s not just the women. All the non-human alien creatures are in subservient positions, too. So are other races – blacks and Asians can be bouinty hunters and beurocrats, but not At The Top, evidently. Only White Males get to be In Control. Maybe this is another way the Wachowsky’s are trying to show them to be EVil.

The Trappings of Royalty are all over the production, starting with the filigree elements on the Warner Brothers Logo and the Village Roadshow logos right at the start of the film, and with all the spaceships and spaceport facilities being filled with pointless decoration and statuary. It’s the same as in David Lynch’s version of Dune, and shows what Dune could’ve looked like if made a few dacades later, when good CGI became available.

c.) Soylent Green is People. You’d think they’d have gotten this trope out of their systems with Cloud Atlas, but, no, they’re back at it again. The Evil Abrasax Clan (and others, presumably, although we don’t meet them in the story) extend their lives at the expense of others, an idea which has become its own trope by now. I suppose it’s as simple a way of showing that the Aristocracy Lives Off the Efforts of a Huge Number of Peons, but it’s not as if we really needed to be told that.
I felt a little let down – after all the hypoe, effort, and money, the essential story boils down to commonplaces – Cinderella, as noted above, with a side order of the Corruption of Power and Blastant Disregard for Human (nonhuman?) lives. I felt the same way about Avatar.

The way I characterized the movie to MilliCal was as "Dune meets Cordwainer Smith – high tech nobility running the Universe, with Animal People as the Underpeople. Then it struck me that this was extremely close to the mark. In both series the machinations revolve around the value of a druf that extends life – Stroon, the Santaclara DRug in Cordwainer’s universe, and Melange, the Spice of Arrakis/Dune in Frank Herbert’s. (Although the main benefit of Melange is the ability to foresee the future and – in large quan tities – to effect spacewarp travel, it’s also a geriatric drug that extends life.) I’d noted the similarity of the two series on this Board before*. This movie combines features of both, right down to the animal-based hybrids being a subservient class, as are Cordwainer Smith’s Underpeople. Could the genesis of Jupiter Ascending actually be rooted in an attempt to use both sets of concepts in a single story? (Of course, even if they wanted to acknowledge this set of roots, they couldn’t possibly admit it without purchasing the rights and effectively making a new version of Herbert or Smith’s work – Harlan Ellison’s pretty much seen to it that no other filmmmaker is ever going to acknowledge getting their ideas from any published work.) An intriguing possibility, although I think Id rather see someone adapt Smith outright, even if they had to work more action/adventure into it. Maybe they did. Jupiter Jones, like Smith’s Rod McBan in Norstrilia, is a single person who ends up Owning the Earth, and involved in intrigues because of it.

*IN both series, people from an earth desert culture control a planet on which oversized creatures produce, through biological means, a substance that can extend life, and do other things as well. This makes the planet incredibly valuable and the subject of political intrigue, and makes those settlers into tough, organized fighters.