Jupiter Ascending, Review: ..and the Earth goes to...

Delayed for over seven months beyond its scheduled release, the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending released this week in India and many other territories. The Wachowskis are writers, producers, and directors, most famous for creating The Matrix series. Their last two films, Cloud Atlas and Speed Racer, tanked at the box office. Jupiter Ascending marks the siblings’ long-awaited return to the science-fiction genre. Named after the heroine, who is herself named after the planet that fascinated her astronomer father, Jupiter is a matrix of real earth, populated by hybrid humans, and the world beyond, which runs earth as fertile colony, harvesting human cells, cells that help the local humans there live for time-spans that run into six figures in yearly terms.

Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) was born under a night sky, with signs predicting that she was destined for great things. Now grown-up, Jupiter an Anglo-Russian, dreams of the stars, but wakes up to the cold reality of her lowly job, cleaning toilets and an endless run of bad breaks. Only when Caine (Channing Tatum), a genetically engineered ex-military hunter, a pointy-eared, half-albino dog-man, arrives on Earth to track her down and escort her to the unknown, does Jupiter begin to glimpse the fate that has been waiting for her all along--her genetic signature marks her as next in line for an extraordinary inheritance that could alter the balance of the cosmos. She’s legally entitled to the holdings of the Abrasax family, a space-based holding corporation, whose portfolio includes Earth.

Caine is not alone in his mission to extract Jupiter, since all three siblings from the house of Abrasax--Titus (Douglas Booth), Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), and Balem (Eddie Redmayne)--are also, legally speaking, Jupiter’s children, and each wants to annex earth, the jewel in the crown, to harvest human cells. So, she faces two attempted alien abductions by bounty hunters engaged by the Abrasaxes. But Caine, who was kicked out of the space police for ripping someone’s throat out with his teeth, had his wings surgically removed, and now uses a pair of gravitational roller-blades, manages to out-maneuver his opponents. Pretty soon, Caine takes Jupiter to meet up with Stinger (Sean Bean), a fellow ex-space-cop who has also had his wings clipped, and who has retired to Earth. Stinger’s hide-out proves no safe haven, as hordes of alien attackers descend upon the trio, leading to a hard-fought battle that ends with Jupiter heading towards her destiny.

Wachowskis weave in tax codes, inheritance laws, incestuous marriages of convenience, inter-planetary corruption, administrative red-tape that has us petty earthlings chuckling with familiarity, and saying, in about 127 ways, that it’s all about the money-ism (with a Capital ‘ism’) and genetic/class differences. There are humans subservient to humans and there are animals subservient to humans and there are hybrids/albinos subservient to humans. There is a whole scene devoted to the behavior patterns of bees as compared to humans, and the first sign of Jupiter’s royal credentials is her ability to cause wave like patterns in swarms of bees at the Stinger safe-house, the bees following her swaying arms. Bees, it is declared, can recognise queens. (Queen bee, anyone?)

SFX, VFX, CGI and animation are the order of the day. Some of it is breath-taking, some painfully repetitive and some that’s lost before you get a chance to wow it. The long aerial battles over Chicago are grossly overdone. As a justification of the wholesale destruction of the skyline, Caine says that it will be regenerated and the public’s memory will be wiped clean. Sure, but where was everybody when the hundreds of building were being pummeled? And just when we thought we would be seeing the regeneration happening, a split second later the camera pans back to Caine.

The two Wachowskis were fans of fantasy fiction and comic books, and wrote for a Marvel Comics series, Ectokid. They started working in Hollywood by penning a script for the Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas action film, Assassins. They were then given directing and screen-writing breaks for the women-centric film, Bound. The siblings ended up directing and co-writing The Matrix, which was followed by two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. In 2012, Lana started making public statements about being a transgendered person, and has now completely assumed the identity of a woman.

Jupiter Ascending has a highly complex plot and a hundred variations on the same theme and similar scenarios. Too many characters and unclear accents (try Sean Bean for size) add to the difficulties of comprehension. If there is a sequential narrative and if the characters’ back-stories are important, why are they not better framed? About the biting incident, there are at least four references, and all you get in the end is Caine saying, “I don’t know why I did that. I don’t remember anything.” When you are straining to make sense in a deafening sound-track, such an explanation comes across as blasé and lazy. One highlight scene, where Caine is able to make his way back into the police space-ship is over-simplistic, unless we missed some vital turns while batting our eyelids. It is largely due to such hurdles that Jupiter Ascending not likely to get the cult status that The Matrix garnered, though it is surely watchable.

Mila Kunis (Black Swan, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Third Person, The Angriest Man in Brooklyn, Blood Ties, Oz), a Jew from Ukraine, migrated with her family when she was seven. Sweet-faced and reminding us of Indian actress Preity Zinta, with elements of Angelina Jolie etched-in, is a good choice for an Anglo-Russian chamber-maid. Her large, expressive eyes add to her ability to express emotions. Cleverly, she is not the one performing the stunts, leaving her to reflect of her fate and the predicament of her family.

Fresh from Foxcatcher, Channing Tatum now ‘wrestles’ all manner of man and beast, across several planets, and in space. “I have more in common with a dog than a man,” he says, as he tries to dispel the growing feelings of love in Jupiter’s heart. Yes, you feel for him. Sean Bean (Game of Thrones) looks the part and gets to take contradictory positions in the story, which helps showcase his prowess. Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything, Les Misérables) uses an affected passionate whisper as his normal speech and contrasts it with a stentorian roar when the situation demands. On a planet that has elixirs aplenty, why does he look anaemic? Douglas Booth (Romeo and Juliet) is regal and Shakespearean in a brief role, Tuppence Middleton (Trance) as his sister strikes all the right chords and is a face to watch out for. ‘Tuppence’ is a gross under-estimation, if there was one. Doona Bae (Cloud Atlas), Tim Pigott-Smith (The Hour) and James D’Arcy (Cloud Atlas) provide support. There is a Bengali character played by Christina Cole, as Gemma Chatterjee, and Singapore born Ramon Tikaram has another bit role, as Phylo Percadium.

Rating: ***

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKy4WqGVD8w

“It’s a fun movie. It’s really just that, a fun movie – action-drama, light comedy, sci-fi mixed with a little humor. I thought the special effects were incredible.”—Mila Kunis