Jupiter Ascending

It’s all just another super-detailed video game, isn’t it? As in so many movies these days, your jaw will drop from the detail work that went into the settings and the super-fast action scenes … and if you’re anything like me, your jaw will drop again in a big, fat, yawn. It’s the yawn that will remain in your memory. You won’t know much about what’s going on, and you won’t much care. Channing Tatum has pointy Spock ears. How original is that? He’s supposed to be part canine. I’d have liked it a lot better if he had hung his head out the window of his spaceship and let his big pink tongue and ears flap in the ether. That, or paused now and then to lick his balls. Eddie Redmayne, our newest Best Actor honoree, is just awful in a part that was written awful. As was everything else in this movie. What a goddam waste! Another $176,000,000 down the creative crapper.

It is clear that the Wachowskis intended this to be the opening episode of a series. None of the three “bad guys” are demonstrably dead at the end, and I suspect a lot of thought went into the various relationships and back story, which may have contributed to the sketchiness of what we see here in terms of plot; they just had too much material to work through. Considering that it barely broke even, I sort of doubt there will be a Part Two.

Wiki says the movie is developing a cult following among “fangirls.” Whereas I understand a lot about fanboys (and generally pity them) I know almost nothing about the girls. They liked the fact that Mila Kunis was a nobody, cleaning toilets, and then discovers she is actually the Queen of the Galaxy. I can dig that, it’s the Cinderella story, isn’t it? And a gorgeous half-dog half-man comes up and starts humping her leg. I can get that, too. But the guy had to rescue her at the last split second at least half a dozen times. She is almost completely passive through the whole movie. Is that part of the attraction for woman? Do they really want to be helpless, rather than do any ass-kicking themselves? Not all women, of course, I’ve heard from plenty who appreciate a take-charge heroine, but still … I find that sort of depressing.