Reloading - Stupider Ascending?

Children, gather around. It’s time for another review of a film (because Uncle Aaron still hasn’t gotten his Majora’s Mask for 3DS because Nintendo, Amazon UK, and his credit card company can’t agree that the transaction was made even though I clearly did it). Instead of getting a review of a game that’s largely irrelevant, you’ll be getting a review of Jupiter Ascending instead… which will largely be irrelevant when this comes out because it’ll have been two weeks old and very likely out of theaters. Hooray!

What is Jupiter Ascending and why should you see it? Jupiter is the name of our title character (it’s not just a planet anymore). It’s also the name of the location where the final battle takes place, must just be a coincidence. Jupiter is a normal girl with a normal life played by Mila Kunis, so you have to wonder how she was able to get away with the whole “normal life” thing. Turns out by some bizarre set of circumstances, she’s actually related to some ancient cosmic family that owns many planets throughout the solar system (and possibly beyond that).

Her normal life is uprooted when aliens show up and try to take her away (by killing her). Everything is changed when Were-Tatum appears to stop the aliens, swoon Jupiter, and basically be our resident badass for the remainder of the film. They eventually are forced to go into space anyway, however, when other hunters (bounty hunters) show up to take Jupiter. The space-police (sadly, not the Green Lantern Corps) get involved. Jupiter is torn between three different siblings in this feud for who gets to take over Earth. Yeah, a lot happens and it all feels like a lot of noise.

Before I start hitting the negatives, I want to point out that visually and conceptually, this film is very solid. There are a lot of space-tech-gadgets that are cool to see and the film takes an approach similar to that of Elysium and doesn’t waste a lot of time explaining them. It just shows them and uses them, allowing you to just see how everything works. Show, don’t tell, is an approach more films need to take and while Jupiter isn’t perfect at this, it’s certainly better than average films.

There’s also lots of world building that it doesn’t spend a heck of a lot of time on that I’d love to see more of. I mean, we’re introduced to so many different types of characters in a relatively short amount of time and so we don’t get much time to expand on them. The story here feels like it was cut down and rushed out the door quick in order to make a completely solid film instead of breaking it up a bit and expanding on things farther. But then we run into the Hobbit problem where we have three films acting as one large film and taking your money three times for what equates to just a third of a story.

But there are lots of issues plaguing the film as a

whole. Motivations for some characters are incredibly hard to understand and, in some cases, turn on a dime, making it hard to really understand why some characters do anything at all. For most, it’s because they want to selfishly extend their own life by a large quantity of time, but that’s only for a select amount of characters. Why do the dragon-lizard monsters work for the creepy elder brother when they largely outnumber him and can probably just throw him into a pit of lava? They can fucking fly, why aren’t they the dominate species?

I suppose that’s another thing that bugs me is that humans are in charge of everything on every planet we find them, which is nearly most of them. But humans are proven to be a weak and pathetic race with their only notable quality being how underestimated they are, giving them just a slight bit of wiggle room to luck out of a bad spot. You’d think the other aliens would have usurped the throne by now and started “Project Kill All Humans.” But maybe I’m thinking too much like a cynical robot to understand why meat-creatures of superior build don’t just take this fucker over.

But there are the forced romantic moments between Mila Kunis and her Were-Tatum counterpart. No, I have nothing against romance in my films. But when you have expositional dialogue talking about how your “man compass” always leads you to bad guys or guys who don’t give a toss about you, I’m starting to think George Lucas wrote this dialogue… or maybe a teenage girl who is writing her first love story. It’s odd how forced these conversations are and you kind of what to just tell Mila Kunis to shut up and talk like a normal person for a bit. Drop the awkwardly stilted dialogue and just say you have a lady-boner for Channing Tatum. You wouldn’t be the first woman I’ve met to admit to that and I doubt you’ll be the last.

The pacing of the middle act is bizarre as well when we finally meet the younger brother and his harem as he tries to stage a fake wedding to gain inheritance of Earth from Mila Kunis through the wedding. Yes, this film found time to fit a wedding within all the other stuff happening… WHILE IN SPACE. And this is why I feel the need for this film to have been broken up and split up a bit better. Each subsequent film could have been a different story involving a different interaction with each sibling. But, instead, interaction is short, cut, and not as deep as they could have been.

I’ve been told this is basically just Matrix in space. But the only thing they really have in common is that they both have humans as cattle. In Matrix, humans power the computer world of the Matrix and are completely expendable. In Jupiter, they provide a natural resource that allows the space-people to extend their lives beyond their normal expectancy. Beyond that, there’s not much else I really see in common. Matrix had a deeper metaphor and was a bit more subtle, but also lacked any real visual appeal with its dated effects. Alternatively, Jupiter looks much fresher, more colorful and imaginative, but lacks a lot of substance underneath all that style. It feels very hallow and lacking of a meaty, or consistent story to keep things moving at a decent pace.

Jupiter Ascending is by no means a bad film. Certainly one of the more interesting ones you could see this weekend if 50 Shades of Grey wasn’t on your list of “Things to Endure”. But other than that, you aren’t missing a lot by seeing it. I certainly had fun with it, even if it was hard to follow the actions or plot during the middle act because it seemed like so many things were happening at once without any real correlation to one another.

Thank you for reading this week’s Reloading. If you enjoyed our review, please be sure to like, share, comment and subscribe. We’ll be back with more reviews for you soon. See ya next time!