Advertisement

Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Jupiter Ascending

JUPITER ASCENDING (Andy and Lana Wachowski). 127 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Friday (February 6). See listing. Rating: NNN 

Where to watch: iTunes


Jupiter Ascending is kind of goony and more than a little cheesy. But it has some absolutely spectacular highs, including an astonishingly complicated chase over and through Chicago that seems like the reason IMAX 3D was invented.

Would that the entire movie had been able to sustain the energy of that early sequence, but maybe that’s impossible. Even The Matrix had to pause for exposition here and there. Jupiter Ascending is overstuffed with ideas, as though the writing/producing/directing siblings who now bill themselves simply as the Wachowskis have crammed an entire space-fantasy action trilogy into a single feature film.

It doesn’t feel like they worried too much about how the compression would affect the dramatic moments, or how the audience would react to the notion of human characters interacting with semi-ridiculous human-animal hybrids in the tale of Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), a young woman who discovers she’s kinda-sorta the reincarnation of a space queen and someone in the galactic royal family wants her dead. 

Channing Tatum is her devoted protector, the wolfish warrior Caine Wise. As you may have guessed, Jupiter Ascending is not a movie where subtlety is valued. The stiff dialogue and unnecessarily complicated plot feels like it was yanked out of an early draft of Star Wars – the plot is driven primarily by a dispute over property rights and control of a galactic mercantile empire – with a few pieces of The Wizard Of Oz thrown in, just for the hell of it. 

It’s one huge repurposing machine, borrowing visual and narrative elements from dozens of genre sources: the orbiting space station from 2001: A Space Odyssey can be seen revolving on the horizon in one galactic panorama, and just when you’re about to get annoyed at a diversion in which the Wachowskis merrily rip off the fantastical bureaucracy of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Gilliam himself pops up to give the project his blessing. 

The cast is ridiculously overqualified. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, of Belle and Beyond The Lights, wears silly mouse ears, Sean Bean is Caine’s tough-guy mentor, and The Imitation Game’s Tuppence Middleton, Orphan Black’s Maria Doyle Kennedy and Luther’s Nikki Amuka-Bird appear in key roles. But all of them, along with Kunis and Tatum, understand the kind of movie they’re making and lean into the giddy space-opera tone. 

Eddie Redmayne – currently the Oscar’s best actor front-runner for The Theory Of Everything, don’t you know – is the only one who doesn’t get it, sticking out like a sore thumb as the sneering, swanning villain. Every time he turns up, the movie stops being fun and suddenly looks like a bunch of people standing around in silly costumes.

Fortunately for us, he doesn’t have enough screen time to do real damage – and fortunately for him, Jupiter Ascending arrives in theatres after most of the ballots have been sent off to the Academy.

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.