Critics reviews

Maybe it's for the best that the Wachowskis' batshit space torpedo was so widely derided that it shall spawn no more part-human, part-canine star children. But for all its absurdities, Jupiter Ascending is wildly entertaining. With its byzantine interstellar architecture and über-operatic take on literally star-crossed love, it's closer in scope and tone to '60s SF literature (especially Samuel R. Delaney, a Wachowski hero) than that of the dour, scientistic, NASA-certified variety so much in fashion.

Catching up with this gaudily eccentric space opera months after its commercial cremation, I'm not remotely surprised by its failure, but I was unexpectedly beguiled by the film's obsessive world building and a rogue streak of romanticism that I wouldn't trade for a dozen stencil-cut Marvel movies. It's an unarguable folly, but that needn't be a bad thing.

Magic Mike as a moody wolf-boy giving you Xanadu 2.0 on intergalactic roller skates? Yes! Eddie Redmayne sneering and mincing, plotting to suck up the life force of earthlings amid a dynastic struggle between his siblings or, you know, whatever? Yes! Hilarious talking dragons, swarms of enchanted bees, and crude ethnic burlesque? Yes! Yes! Yes! ...The Wachowskis are living for a unique, utterly doomed brand of earnest maximalism and I am here for it.

The film moves between highly futuristic CGI weapons and data visualisation, and a steampunk style combination of wooden frames, clockwork mechanisms and electronic devices. Unsurprisingly, the plot struggles to be found amongst this stunning free-for-all. I don't think it matters very much. It is not a film built on its sophisticated narrative or character interactions but rather a testament to... the great achievements in visual effects that have been achieved over the last century of cinema.

It's not always easy to be a Mila Kunis fan. Certainly, there's a lot to draw you in—keen comic timing, a voice that routinely shows more range in a single scene than some actresses manage over their entire careers, and alluring, distinctive features. Yet these very apparent strengths are all too often drowned out in Jupiter Ascending, the Wachowskis' latest maximalist CGI onslaught which wobbles between borderline-incomprehensible spectacle and failed operatic drama.

It must be said that Jupiter Ascending falls under so many influences — Terry Gilliam, George Lucas, Luc Besson, The Wizard of Oz, Carl Sagan, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tom Hulce in Amadeus, Björk on the cover of Homogenic — that all the visions blur and compete. After a while, you're watching a malfunctioning kaleidoscope as much as a movie... But there are moments of loveliness along the way...

The tangles over Jupiter's royal prerogative are written with comic-book crudeness that the theatrical performances don't quite honor with self-conscious comedy. Instead, the three heirs—and Redmayne in particular—play to the virtual balcony such plastic gems as "I create life! And I destroy it." Why dwell on the slender story of a massively scaled digital epic? Because the Wachowskis don't achieve much of merit, or even of note, with their roiling C.G.I. exertions.

It's just a few musical numbers and a whiff of marijuana smoke short of being the Thomas Pynchon book of big-budget, effects-driven movie sci-fi. What's sort of remarkable is the way the Wachowskis manage to digest all of their high- and low-brow influences into something like a cohesive worldview.

The performances are especially unconvincing in the quieter, intimate scenes because, while the Wachowskis know how to put on a big show and — like many other spectacle-minded filmmakers — excel at blowing their fantasies to smithereens, they too often fumble something more crucial and more difficult to pull off: ordinary, believable human emotions.

Jupiter Ascending's unwieldy, cumbersome narrative grows convoluted quicker than a M. Night Shyamalan film, all handled with the same unsure sense of mood that's become the Wachowskis' stock-in-trade since The Matrix.

It's not "so bad it's good," which would at least promise a certain lunkheaded obsessiveness. Nor is it aim-for-the-moon-and-land-among-the-stars bad, or any other sub-category of bad that one could make a critical case for. It's blandly, often listlessly bad, check-the-blockbuster-boxes bad, just-out-of-film-school-and-shopping-a-tentpole-screenplay bad.