Critics reviews

A frenetic, fantastical but frustrating piece of work, Jupiter’s Moon explores themes Mundruczó has certainly covered better elsewhere... It’ll be remembered not for its rather woolly handling of serious subject matter, but for a couple of excellent performances, and [its] stunning images and sequences

Whatever allegorical import Mundruczó is reaching for gets lost amid the endless swooping Steadicam shots and CGI trickery. "Jupiter’s Moon" feels like a calling card movie and we’ll surely hear more from Kornél Mundruczó in future, but will he have anything worthwhile to say?

It [dishes] up politics and escapism at the same time, playing around with some cool ideas but not provoking much thought. The politics get lost, metaphors muddled. That said, it is consistently thrilling... It might not quite know what it’s doing, but it does it with style, an enormous does of wish fulfilment, and moments of true grace.

By [the end], the flying trick, repeated ad infinitum, with upraised arms, needs more than gravity-defiance to make it meaningful.

Kornél Mundruczó, on the strength of White God, returned with a dopey Eurothriller, Jupiter's Moon, that repeated the same dodgy CGI effect—a man floating in the air—like an aging circus performer lingering on his flourish.

How this kind of magic-realist spectacularism helps to improve the lot of immigrants is anybody's guess.

Mundruczó has his sights set firmly on Hollywood-scale genre filmmaking, but, either due to lack of funds or vision, his stylistic box of tricks is very limited, and the director is content to show off these few flourishes early and deploy them often. Long, winding, eventful tracking shots of the Emmanuel Lubezki mould crop up constantly, adding quickly-diminishing hyperreal tension to scenes ranging from the refugees' perilous flight, to simple, mild-simmer thriller-by-numbers dialogue scenes

The movie is an earnest religious parable, executed with a leadenness that can feel at odds with Aryan's gravity-defying new abilities. The moments you remember are the flashiest: Aryan making a room spin in "Inception"-style circles or levitating over a city street, like a melancholy homage to "The Matrix" and "Wings of Desire" in one. In these moments your eyes pop out of your head, but at other points they might be more inclined to roll.

It's hard to think of a more blatant Hollywood begging letter than Kornél Mundruczó's weirdo, self-serious genre mash-up, Jupiter's Moon, which played in competition at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. It adopts a simple B-movie plot line and introduces a morally slippery central protagonist then, for two hours plus, runs tracking shot rings around them as if the makers have made a bet between themselves to make each shot more needlessly bravura than the last.

How is it possible that a story tapping into the Syrian refugee crisis can sound so spectacularly original on paper, only to percolate, stagnate, and suffocate on its own ideas in a span of two hours, leaving a stale corpse of a picture in its wake?

[The] heavy burden of the subject matter ends up weighing the film down and playing on a fairly repetitive loop with slight dramatic variations. And the sheer mind-boggling ambition of the [topics] (migrants, Europe, disintegration, innocence, evil, redemption and so on)... hinders Mundruczó from accomplishing his mission, despite the movie’s undeniable visual excellence.

Jupiter’s Moon is a highly ambitious and thoroughly entertaining trip and if the politics is more backdrop than subtext, what remains is compelling and occasionally beautiful enough for you to enjoy the flight.