There are a lot of complex emotions that one can experience before, during and after you see Jupiter Ascending. Such skilled and descriptive prose is far beyond my capabilities, so what remains within reach is inarticulate yelling and vaguely racialist curses.
Let's get this horse out of the gates at full speed: while watching Jupiter Ascending, I did not finish my popcorn. I didn't even come close to finishing my popcorn. I spent about an hour and ten minutes with a giant bag of popcorn in the seat next to me, mocking me for my poor life choices.
If you're familiar with me, that's not a good sign. When I'm a hungry boy, whether or not I'm fighting off a horrendous cold right now (what a great spring break), I can chow down on some popcorn. I love popcorn. I love pizza, too, my favorite foods start with P, I'm like a Sesame Street character, without the wide-eyed innocence that lets Sesame Street exist in a just and fair world.
What follows is a necropsy on a piece of shit movie that is offensive not only for its content, but for its magnificently wasted promise and talent.
Jupiter Ascending opens with an exposition voiceover by Mila Kunis, detailing how her stupid parents met in Russia, conceived and named her, and how her stupid dad got killed while some Moscow home invaders tried to steal his stupid brass telescope that he used to look at space with.
It cuts to Mila Kunis waking up in Chicago as part of a Russian immigrant dirt family that cleans the houses of rich shithead 1%ers just so we can have a montage of her scrubbing toilets.
And man, the universe that this movie exists in stinks, like one of Mila Kunis' unscrubbed toilets.
I'll give you a rundown on the desperately needed backstory to this movie, which is so goddamn unsettling and despicable, they keep it from you for pretty much the entire time.
1: humans are actually a billion year old species from a planet somewhere else in the galaxy, and not Earth.
2: a rich elite of british humans from outer space control a megacorporation that seeds planets with human life, and then "harvests" the planet once the population gets big enough.
3: Mila Kunis is somehow the genetic reincarnation of the mother of the elites that we see, and has a legal claim on Earth and all of its resources.
4: the elite then keep themselves immortal by bathing in the weird magical material that is somehow extracted from all those people, the magical material is stored in glass cylinders and is a mostly opaque white color until you drop it on the ground, where it gets watery.
it looks like cum. an interstellar, possibly intergalactic commerce empire based off processing humans like cheese and turning them into 1-liter bottles of cum to rub on your face and live forever if you can afford it.
it's Dune meets Hitchhiker's Guide with a dash of Phantom Menace, but for stupid people.
for two hours one shitass scene to the next keeps introducing new names for things, and new plots, and then discards everything immediately in order to start something new.
Mila Kunis lives a life in poverty and is being convinced by her shady cousin to sell her eggs, which will net him $10,000, and only $5,000 for her. Why does he get so much more money? "That's capitalism, babe. All the shit flows downhill and the profits flow... up."
Fuck you, just fuck you. Apparently Lana and Andy Wachowski dug through an old box of short stories from their 8th grade creative writing class, blew the dirt off one, and mailed it straight to Hollywood.
Concurrent with that storyline, Best Actor in a Leading Role Academy Award Winner Eddie Redmayne is the oldest brother of a trio of siblings who control one of the cum-empires. He controls his dead mom's estate, his bitch sister is some immortal vampiress, and his younger brother is an asshole hedonist who fucks chicks with tails and feathers in zero gravity. Eddie Redmayne, who is either constantly on the verge of tears whispering at a barely audible level, or on the verge of tears and screaming incoherently, wants to be the top cum-producer in the galaxy, and 8 billion cum-filled specimens on Earth is too important a resource to let anyone else lay claim to it. He wants to kill the reincarnation of his mom, and hires bounty hunters
GOT IT? OK
Scaryass little Gollum monsters pretend to be the clinic workers where Mila Kunis is selling her eggs, and just as they lure her into the operating room to check her genes to make sure she's the reincarnated Dalai Momma and are about to kill her, in bursts the only interesting thing in the movie.
Channing Tatum, triple threat american treasure, bursts into the OR on rocket boots, shoots the gollums in the face, and skates out with Mila Kunis' unconscious body cradled in his arms.
What happens next is the first of like 5 SCENE HALTINGLY terrible moments between Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>These two beautiful people are so incapable of creating even the smallest spark between them, and I don't know why. Mila Kunis can be a good actress. She played a great unlikeable character on that 1970's show i forget the name of. And Channing Tatum is Channing Tatum.
So why are these motherfuckers destroying the rhythm and tone of this movie, and what dumbass casting director should be fed to the soylent green machine for being possibly too stupid to live and not have these two read with each other?<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
After the first trainwreck of personal chemistry, a special effects spectacle happens and alien fightercraft annihilate Chicago trying to kill Channing Tatum on his rocket boots. Name the Chicagoan landmark and it gets shot to shit and with bombs that implode everything. Willis Tower crashes to the ground. That church from the Dresden Files gets incinerated. Fighters destroy the entire L-train system, the collateral damage for this failed attack has to be in the thousands.
But don't worry, as they're driving away Channing Tatum explains that the aliens have neuralyzers from Men In Black and are able to rebuild the city in about 5 minutes. Stick that fact in your back fucking pocket.
Then comes the only part of the movie I enjoyed, as they roll up to Sean Bean's house in the countryside that is half covered in beehives.He's an ex-space cop who used to work with Channing Tatum and now lives in the Honeycomb Hideout.
It's there you find out that Mila Kunis is a space princess when the bees surround her, and Sean Bean gets over his old beef with Channing Tatum to invite them into the Honeycomb Hideout and get ready to get attacked by bounty hunters.
Here's where the plotlines start dropping like flies.
Sean Bean has a sick daughter for some reason, and- OH
OH
OH MAN
I forgot something important.
Channing Tatum is a genetically modified human, referred to as a 'Lycantant', half wolf half human who used to be in the space police. He also used to have wings, for some reason, and he had to turn them in along with his badge when he got kicked out of the space police for biting the throat out of the CEO of one of the cum-empires.
Sean Bean is ALSO a genetically modified human, but instead of being spliced with wolves he got spliced with bees, and likes talking about bees. His bee daughter is sick, with something. Colony Collapse Disorder, whatever i don't give a fuck.
It's all these disparate, clashing, completely unexplained plot developments that really hammer home the fact that I'd rather be watching The Matrix. I love The Matrix. I wrote about it on this very blog a while back during a rewatch. It's so good, and yeah it doesn't make any goddamn sense to use people as batteries, but it doesn't matter. Morpheus was such a powerful plot device that we didn't NEED to know. It stuck with a story, and kept to it.
Jupiter Ascending assumed pretty things and steampunk/neoclassical technology but with forcefields would fill in any plot holes that showed up.
There's a plotline where Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum go to the Central Bureaucracy to get her a cum-empire runner license that is just STUPID, Mila Kunis gets kidnapped by each sibling and has to listen to their dumbass 1%-parody justification for jamming humans into tube to extract their precious resources, first the sister then the younger brother and finally Eddie Redmayne.
Oh also when humans found Earth 100 million years ago, they genocided the dinosaurs, but maybe not all of them since Eddie Redmayne has enforcers that look like a combination of gargoyles, Krogan from Mass Effect, and Theodore Rex.
An hour later from this I walked out of the theater with a sour taste in my mouth, and looking forward to rip this shit apart.
Will I watch this movie again? Yes
Creaky-hand drunk? Probably
Will the Wachowskis ever make a good movie again?
You know the answer.
The worst part of all is at the end, once Eddie Redmayne is dead and off to collect his Oscar for playing that wheelchair guy, Mila Kunis is now the owner of Earth and totally getting rutty with Channing Tatum.
She's keeping the fact that she is CEO of one of the biggest cum-reservoirs in the galaxy secret from her awful Russian immigrant family, and goes off on a rocket boot date with Channing Tatum. Who by the way is named "Caine Wise".
She owns the Earth. The entire planet, and all its resources of the surrounding galaxy. And goes off on a date. Doesn't halt climate change, doesn't stop desertification, ebola, or the threat of nuclear war or end our reliance on hydrocarbons and start a new reliance on cum, no. She just goes off on a date. Syria is still at war with itself.
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