Why So Blu?

‘Jupiter Ascending’ Is Wonderfully…AWFUL! (Movie Review)

If I was completely ignorant and judged Jupiter Ascending by its cover, I’d be staying the hell away from it even though I love science fiction.  The trailers for the movie looked absolutely horrible.  When they pulled it from its former release schedule last year I have to be honest with y’all, I was hoping this would’ve been shelved for a long time, preferably long after I passed from this Earth.  However, that wasn’t the case.  What we had last year was just a minor speed bump and presumably to allow additional time needed to complete over 2,000 special effects shots of the film and prepare an effective marketing campaign.  I’m sorry, but I just had to laugh out loud at the effective marketing reason.  You can’t polish something that looks like a turd.  You have to completely paint over it, but I digress.

So what really sold me on Jupiter Ascending, despite me wanting nothing to do with it, was two things.  First and foremost, I’m a huge science fiction fan.  How many big, ambitious science fiction movies actually get green lighted?  With that thought in mind, no matter if Jupiter Ascending sucks the big one or not, we as a sci-fi loving audience have to come together and at least support the finished product to take at least some sting out of that whopping 175-million dollar budget.  Secondly, it’s written, produced and directed by The Wachowskis (The Matrix films).  Needless to say, their names carry a lot of clout in the genre, and how can you turn your back on the duo without giving it at least a look, right?  Show them some money=love!

You can call Jupiter Ascending a space opera, I guess, much like how Star Wars was billed.  It centers on a female protagonist named, you guessed it, Jupiter!  Well, to be fair, her full name is Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis).  Her profession is that of a maid, cleaning people’s houses.  So you can see why I could compare it to Star Wars, right?  I mean Luke Skywalker was pretty much just a nobody, farmer kind of type, right?  There’s also some more star power to report here too!  Jupiter Ascending also stars the full-headed Sean Bean and every female’s favorite stripper, Channing Tatum, as Caine Wise, an interplanetary warrior who informs Jones that her destiny extends beyond Earth.  Bazinga!  Now our story is in full-motion!

I really want to tell you so badly that I wish this was one of those times where my apprehension and fear of the trailers was all for nothing, but alas I cannot.  Jupiter Ascending is as asinine and God awful as the trailers make it out to be.  The special effects are top notch, but beyond that the film is an ambitious, convoluted mess of hot, smelly poo.  And I’ll be the first to tell you, I so wanted to be wrong about it.  I dragged my girlfriend after a long day of work to this screening.  Mind you, she wanted nothing to do with this film either, but I persuaded her it might just be entertaining.  I felt so bad because every time I glanced over at her I knew she was in utter pain throughout the film’s exhausting two-hour runtime.  Ugh!  Now I really do have to take her to see 50 Shades of Grey next weekend to make up for this.

To be honest, I first and foremost blame the screenplay.  Did no one even bother reading this piece of cr@p?  I can’t even get one million to make my superb feature film I wrote, but The Wachowskis get $175 million?  FOR THIS??????!!!!!  I know they are the bomb because of their past work and even though I enjoyed Cloud Atlas, it wasn’t all that.  It starts with the script, guys, and obviously someone failed to read this before signing the check for this blasphemy to get made.

The most entertaining part of Jupiter Ascending is making fun of the actual film itself and the fact that they actually got Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis (I won’t even touch Sean Bean) to sign on for this fecal matter of a production.  Most would call this a B-movie, and I would agree, but that doesn’t make this a good B-movie.  What happens when you try too hard to create that space opera magic of Star Wars coupled with trying to ground yourself on Earth like the Guardians of the Galaxy managed to do even though we were only on Earth for 5 measly minutes in that film?  The result is Jupiter Ascending.  I was at least hoping for something fun and campy akin to The Fifth Element, but if you could just watch the cringes on the faces in the audience this past Tuesday night, then you’d know that would be utter blasphemy comparing it to the much superior Luc Besson film.  That would be like comparing a personal computer in today’s world to one that existed in 1979, no comparison.

The film’s plot is inconsequential and in all honesty my time is way too precious to even warrant typing out a paragraph more of what it was all about.  I’d rather drive my beloved Mustang GT head on into a wall than spend one more minute re-living what I saw.  For those of you who know me well, you know I’m serious when I talk about physical harm to my sports car.  Even the Terry Gilliam scene was botched, not to mention the mind numbing action sequences that really served no point because most of the times it was so fast and swirled it looked like Channing Tatum (never mind the elf ears) was part of a video game, a big Second Son mess of one.  Mila Kunis?!!!  What were you thinking?  Do you need money this bad?!!!  You are SO MUCH better than this!  Ugh!!!!  And never in a million years did I ever believe someone was remotely capable of writing a worse love story than that of George Lucas.

So in conclusion I am going to do something totally different here and break it down like this.  It’s no surprise that down below I have awarded Jupiter Ascending a score of 1.5 out of a maximum of 5 possible.  However, what I feel I need to do is justify what each .5 point of the score I gave it was for.  I don’t want you thinking for one second I honestly enjoyed myself at all.  LOL.  So here we go!

.5 of a point gets awarded for Eddie Redmayne and the surprising way he shouted his lines at times, almost taking himself and the dialog a little too serious.  That elicited laughs from the audience.

.5 of a point goes to the fact that copying off of an Admiral Akbar type character we get awarded an elephant man pilot whose roar was completely hysterical.

The last .5 of a point goes to the fact that they showed Tuppence Middleton naked from behind.

 

And that ladies and gentlemen is all I can say positive about Jupiter Ascending.  It really is that atrocious.  I strongly urge you to take up needlepoint, wash your hair or do anything that will keep you from wasting hard earned dollars on this flop.  Send Hollywood a message that we homo sapiens are more intelligent than this.  Don’t even see it for free.  It’s not worth it!  And don’t ask me if there’s anything after the credits.  As soon as they started to roll the whole audience cleared out and the remarks people made about this one in the theater lobby afterwards were far from pleasant.  Heed this warning.  I implore you.

*

 JUPITER ASCENDING IS WHY GOD MADE RAZZIES.

*

IT WAS LITERALLY INSULTING HAVING TO SIT THROUGH THIS.

*

 CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WACHOWSKIS FOR JOINING THE M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN CLUB.

*

THIS MOVIE SUCKED!

*