Review: ‘Jupiter Ascending’

“Jupiter Ascending” feels like an accidental cousin to other recent movies featuring female leads who have been chosen to change their world. Whether it be “The Hunger Games” or “Divergent,” movies in which entire worlds are built with their own rules, in which a hero is picked seemingly at random, and for whom a greater purpose is revealed. It’s like a young adult version of “The Matrix” but with way more space travel and alien creatures.

Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is an illegal Russian immigrant, having been brought over by her single mom and extended family, and she is unfortunately in the family business, which is to say, she’s a housekeeper, going around to rich peoples’ homes all around Chicago and being envious of their possessions between breaks from cleaning toilets. She misses her father, whom she never met, and she says more than once that she hates her life, which is understandable because it looks like a pretty miserable existence. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her, there is a royal family in outer space known as the Abrasax family, and they are having themselves a little land rights dispute, with the argument centering around Earth and its resources. And thanks to reincarnation, they know that the true heir to Earth is actually on Earth, and they want to find this person, with each family member having their own reasons for wanting to do so. So there is a race to see who finds her first so she can be brought to the family.

Enter Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a space soldier turned bounty hunter who also happens to be a human who was spliced with a wolf creature, making him part canine, but also at one point he had bio-wings apparently? So he’s like a flying wolf-dog man kind of thing, and he finds Jupiter first and tries to bring her to the guy who hired him, but that gets a little complicated. And along the way, his feelings for Jupiter get complicated, and vice versa. The rest of the movie is about who exactly gets to “own” Earth and the revelation as to why Earth even exists and what it means in the scope of the rest of the universe and its many inhabitants.

This is totally a space opera epic kind of deal, like “Star Wars” or “Guardians of the Galaxy,” as it features multiple different alien races and hints at a large industrial-complex within the universe, a huge machine of which Earth is merely a cog, so “Jupiter Ascending” simultaneously goes for an epic story in its scope but also an intimate story of change as almost the whole thing focuses on Luke Skywalke -, er I mean, on Neo — uhh, I mean Jupiter Jones.

At this point, it is impossible to say that the Wachowskis don’t know how to make a movie, because they most certainly do. “Jupiter Ascending” is a gorgeous film, with incredible and cohesive production design throughout, as well as some really exciting and well done action sequences. There is one chase scene in particular that happens above Chicago in the minutes before the sun starts to rise, and this is all super exciting and looks awesome. Also the “gravity boots” featured in this movie look, quite simple, very cool, and the action derived from their usage is great. On a technical level, this film has everything going for it.

But on the story level, it is simply hollow. There’s a nice little story about Jupiter and her journey from a nobody to a somebody, but there just doesn’t seem to be much separating her from the other heroines out there in movies these days. Outside of the weird land rights issue at the center of the drama (which reminds me of how “Speed Racer” ended up being about corporate interests, stock manipulation and company buyouts), the story has no really unique elements at all. We got the Sleeping Hero once again, told she is The One, what a shock, but she has to accept her place and claim her entitlement, much like how Neo had to believe he was The One in order to be The One or how Jesus had to finally accept his fate as the doomed to die savior. She also meets a guy and just like 99% of all movies, they both fall in love with each other after a short time together despite hardly knowing each other (because this ain’t a BOOK, dammit, we don’t have TIME for that shit!), and unfortunately you can see just about most story beats coming from a mile away. The reason this movie can be summed up as “The Matrix” in outer space is because this story just consists of character archetypes and plot lines that we’ve seen hundreds of times before. So all the cool effects and gravity boots and different creatures can’t disguise the fact that this movie is a big retread. If they had put the time into updating the story elements in the same way they constantly update the way they actually make movies, they may have found some cool ways to subvert our expectations, maybe even surprise us here or there, this could have been something quite memorable.

I really wanted to like this movie, which may be why I seem to like it more than most, but even then it is surface-level liking, as in I have no real interest to revisit this world or this movie. It was a somewhat interest diversion for a couple of hours, but it won’t be anything that people will be writing about years from now. It is something instead that people will mostly forget about, while the Wachowskis move on to their next project. And even with the lukewarm reception of this movie on my part, I will still see their next movie opening day. Because they know how to make damn movies. Now let’s just wait and see if they can tell a good story next time out.

Two quick notes: 1) Jupiter falls from great heights at least four or five times in this movie, to be saved by Caine Wise and his gravity boots each and every single time. And 2) there is a great sequence in this movie that is a direct homage to “Brazil,” complete with Terry Gilliam cameo, but in the end, it is also a pointless sequence that doesn’t really advance the story in a significant way. Sometimes we have to kill our darlings.