Superficially, Jupiter Ascending has all the ingredients for a fun bit of sci-fi nonsense. Jupiter Jones, downtrodden Earth-cleaner, one day discovers that by sharing a genetic resemblance to a dead alien, she has inherited the Earth. In her quest to claim her inheritance (and thus ensure that the Earth’s inhabitants aren’t harvested by the nasty space-capitalists), she is forced on an interstellar journey filled with double-crossing super-rich siblings, eight-foot talking-lizard henchmen, and a half-man-half-dog-disillusioned-ex-space-policeman who ice-skates in the sky.
With that as the basis, you might have expected the film to be fun; a less camp Flash Gordon, or a more camp The Fifth Element. And yet, for some reason, the film seems to take itself very seriously. Like the one child at the school nativity who frowns when the other children forget their lines, Jupiter Ascending is confusingly earnest.
Amidst this earnestness, the film suffers from two crippling flaws; primarily, and critically, the narrative doesn’t withstand much scrutiny. There are plot holes large enough to fly the Millenium Falcon through, and you almost get the impression that there was someone standing at the back of the film shoot, with a stop-watch, whose sole job was to ring a klaxon every fifteen minutes and shout “right, it’s time for an explosion”.
The second flaw regards the characters; with the exception of one or two, they’re either one-dimensional, or so underdeveloped it would be tenuous to claim that they had anything resembling a dimension. Cases in point are the recurring ‘characters’ of three hitmen, who stalk Jupiter from the shadows. After the long, sweeping establishing shot, I was quite looking forward to hearing them speak. After their third appearance, I was just wishing that they’d have some sort of interaction with each other (or, quite frankly, anyone).
Turning to look at the positive, the set design and character design are fantastic. The CGI is stunning, and Eddie Redmayne is fabulous as the louche pantomime villain, growling in his glittery, sequined cape and killing subordinate lizard-clerks as the mood takes him. (Having said this, though, his character is rather visually and thematically reminiscent of Gary Oldman’s sinister industrialist ‘Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg’ in The Fifth Element, right down to the rhinestone-studded god-complex.)
Jupiter Ascending seems to want to be many different things – a schmaltzy fable asserting the importance of family, a sci-fi critique on capitalism, and the tale of a bitter ex-policeman seeking redemption and reinstatement, to name just a few. If the various strands were woven together, it could have been an interesting, genre-hopping adventure. As it is, though, it comes across as a bit muddled, with all of the different aspects neatly partitioned in their separate scenes. Terry Gilliam’s thirty-second cameo, and homage to his bureaucratic masterpiece Brazil (name-checking the dreaded 27B/6), illustrates this well. While enjoyable, and another chance for the CG artists and costume department to excel, it’s tonally, thematically, and visually dissonant with the rest of the film. And never mentioned again.
Jupiter Ascending is not, then, by any stretch of the imagination, a good film. And yet it is one that I would heartily recommend. Yes, it’s confused, and yes, it’s inappropriately po-faced. But it’s beautiful, ambitious, and, in a landscape of sequels, prequels, and remakes, it’s an original story.