Whenever someone brings up Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s body of work, The Matrix is always at the center of the conversation. Maybe Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas get some mentions thanks to their vocal followers, but their spacefaring epic Jupiter Ascending is typically swept under the rug. A critical and financial disaster, most people wouldn’t blame you for forgetting about it. And that’s a shame because we believe there are enough reasons after 10 years to give it a rewatch with new eyes.
Sometimes, it’s great to step away from the best sci-fi movies of all time and watch some middling, or even downright bad movies from time to time. It’s enriching, giving you a better understanding of the medium as well as a renewed appreciation for the audiovisual masterpieces that did manage to land their shots.
Space operas are a notoriously difficult genre to nail. Sure, there are fantastic examples of what happens when it goes right, but for every Star Wars or Dune there are a dozen cataclysmic big-screen misfires. Some of them are pure awful, but others have discernible hints of genius lost amidst all the narrative rubble and CGI noise. Enter Jupiter Ascending.
Millennia-spanning human dynasties that harvest planets to make their lives longer. a human whose genes were spliced with a space wolf’s, reincarnation backed by hokey, half-explained science… Jupiter Ascending isn’t an easy sell, and truth be told its story is the weakest aspect behind the world-building it puts at the forefront, but it’s exactly the sort of ‘bad movie’ that’s worth revisiting.
The bad: An eye-rolling, too-wordy tale for a new universe
Jupiter Ascending spends far too much time yapping about market disputes and profits while failing to present a compelling narrative built around it. The story orbits around Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), who was named by her astronomer father after the famous gas giant. Her dull, aimless life in Chicago as a cleaner who’s stuck with her relatives is the opposite of special though.
Despite the classic Cinderella setup and colorful sci-fi universe, the Wachowskis’ script is smothered by half-baked exposition and infighting, centered around the highly profitable business of ‘harvesting’ developed worlds for ‘youth serum’ the extraterrestrial elites use to live for thousands of years.
Add overblown family matters that come and go (at least two major villains are entirely dropped and never brought up again) to the mix and you’ve got a muddled mess of a plot.
By comparison, even the much-maligned Star Wars: The Phantom Menace – another space adventure far too concerned with the markets and galactic politics – feels focused and tight. As breezy as the aforementioned fish-out-of-water setup sounds, Jupiter’s odyssey repeatedly gets bogged down by busy work and seemingly endless descriptions of a vast, rich universe that we barely get to see for ourselves.
There are some baffling tonal shifts between goofy sci-fi and high drama and the whole thing just takes too long to get going, spending much of its runtime plodding around on Earth. Combine that with an oversaturation of set pieces and we’re left with precious little time to spend with our main characters.
The good: A feast for the eyes and ears with a distinct style
Despite its shortcomings, you can’t deny that Jupiter Ascending continues to be a gorgeous movie. The CGI work has its ups and downs, sure, but the Wachowskis traditionally excel at making fantasy come to life and this is no exception. Many would even argue the ‘overly digital’ look of their post-Matrix movies is a feature and not a bug. Their works, no matter the setting, could be considered the opposite of grounded, with high saturation and vibrant lighting working well in tandem with the exuberant sets, costumes, and shiny spaceships of their space opera to create an ethereal, dreamlike world. If you’re looking for tangible realism in Jupiter Ascending, you’re watching it wrong.
Luc Besson’s Valerian‘s (2017) took a similar approach to creating a stunning sci-fi universe, and received a similar critical response of “nice visuals, shame about everything else.” In a post-Avatar world, it’s easy to notice which filmmakers felt inspired by a blue behemoth that dethroned even Star Wars at the box office. Does it all work? Not by a long shot. In fact, many characters and locales in Jupiter Ascending sadly have an ‘overbudgeted Fifth Element‘ aura that probably wasn’t what the Wachowskis (nor the director of photography John Toll) were going for.
To the surprise of no…
