Review of Jupiter Ascending (2015) by Estefano S — 13 Jul 2015

Jupiter Ascending is the latest film from the Wachowskis, famous for creating the Matrix back in the late 90's. This is not a repeat performance. Jupiter Ascending is about a young woman named Jupiter who discovers that she is genetically identical to a dead space queen and...um...well I'll get to more of the plot in a bit, it gets a bit confusing and I'm gonna need some time to write down all the big points.

Things I Liked:

Channing Tatum. I really have been enjoying Channing Tatum lately. He's improving as an actor in everything from the past few years and it's great. He carries this film with both badass charisma and heartfelt emotional depth, or as much as one can in an over the top, too fast for itself, sci-fi whirlwind. He's honestly the only character you really give a damn about throughout the whole mess and he creates a new type of sci-fi hero, that unfortunately isn't in a film that's able to hold him up in the way I felt he should have been.

Eddie Redmayne. Alright, before everyone starts throwing stones and commenting about how wrong I am hear me out. This movie is hard as hell to understand, at least when Redmayne was talking I felt like I could keep up with the dialogue. Yeah he has that weird whispery voice thing. But honestly it fit his character fairly well and the moments when he shouted out of nowhere, I got the sense that it was more a directorial choice than Redmayne's own choice. I really enjoyed Eddie in this and it reminded me that he is in fact a good actor, trapped in a bad film.

The Visual World. The visual element of this film is easily the best part. I was fascinated by the world that was created and I was really bummed out that this movie wasn't great because I felt that the world had many more stories to tell and was bummed out that we aren't gonna see them. The technology was unique and interesting, as was the mythology, the creatures, and all points in between. It was the coolest part of the film and I found the film more enjoyable because of it.

Things I Didn't Like:

Pretty Much Everything Else. This film was hard to get through. The plot was convoluted and overly twisty, so much so that I couldn't even give you a synopsis because it would be too hard to understand. The other characters were two dimensional and forgettable. The story was fairly uninteresting. The dialogue was jargony and confusing. There was too much going on to remember where you started and the movie felt much longer than it actually was. The film was something that should have been broken into parts and fleshed out much more because by the time the film was over we didn't give a damn about what happened to the characters or the story, or the world. It was too big for itself, tried to do too much, and suffered as a result.

Overall. Overall, the performances are reasonably fine and the visual effects are fantastic. The world that was created was vast, fantastic, monumental, and interesting. However the plot is so complex you can barely keep up, there are too many characters who are not fleshed out enough to make us care. If there are two things that you should make sure are solid in a film, it's plot and characters. When both are weak or too much, the rest of your film suffers no matter what else is going on. This film is an initially cool idea that went wrong and it was one of the hardest movies to get through in a while.