Movie: Jupiter Ascending

[ana0119]

So I went to see Jupiter Ascending last night. I was disappointed.

It was bad. I went in expecting it to be bad, but for about 2/3-3/4, it wasn’t even hilarious-bad, just dull-bad.

Only maybe the endgame sequence, on Jupiter, once the heroine basically says, “You can kill me and my family, but I won’t let you have Earth” (because it’s implied she realized he was just going to kill them all), is when it starts to get at least kind of okay - her kneeing the villain in the groin in the confusion, the way she ran around pretty spryly, the way he says she won’t shoot him, so she just shoots him in the leg, the fact that she doesn’t need to get rescued from the villain, only the whole place blowing up… It was okay. Not even all that amusing, but pretty okay.

The rest of the movie was just bland and dull. Like… this entire script needed a lot of editing. A lot. The plot isn’t just cliche or lame, it just wasn’t well put together. There were so, so many plot points that never got followed up on, were out of place, or just didn’t fit.

A short list:

• Stringer and his daughter: What were they even for? To paint Caine as a good, selfless guy, who’s never in it for his own good? Why? It would have been just fine if he was working for his own pardon (it was good enough for Han Solo, geez). Even the scenes where Stinger moved the plot along were all minor, so they could have been rewritten to work without him pretty easily. He’s just pointless, in a movie that’s already pretty crowded.
• The bees: What was that and why?
• Kalique. She just kind of vanishes after a couple of scenes. She’s the only sibling that gets no follow up. I’m pretty bitter about this because I thought the stuff she said was the potentially most interesting.
• Caine’s past: we get a lot of minutiae about his past and it gets brought up a lot, buuut… it’s very poorly integrated and never followed up on in any real way. I at least expected to find out that his “can’t remember why I did it” had something to do with the short-term memory wiping tech we know they have.
• And finally, the entire “harvesting people” thing. Yes, this major plot thread that gets brought up over and over again does not get any follow up or resolution. It feels ridiculously extraneous, like they needed an excuse to imperil the Earth, even though in the end it just felt more like Balem’s grudge than anything. You seriously could have just cut this, with some surprisingly effort. What the hell.

Worse, is the fact that nothing gets paralleled properly. There is no… how to say, connectedness? in the narrative. Maybe I’m just dumb, but the parallels that should have added weight and depth to the story were just never made. I mean, look, Caine’s thing is that he wants to get his wings back (…along with helping Stinger get his, again, that was so pointless), and in the endgame, he fights a winged enemy. This is never pointed out or made into any kind of point, even a small, passing one. Or the whole “family” thing - Jupiter is super concerned for her family in the endgame, but Balem is also technically her family in a way and doing it out of mommy issues, but the obvious connection is never made at all.

These are very small things, yes, but their complete lack throughout makes the whole movie feel very empty and meaningless. Things happen, but they don’t really have any weight. It’s unpolished.

In more minor notes, the dialogue is pretty lacking too. It convey the ideas, but it’s poor in style. The only times I was even a little okay with it was surprisingly Jupiter and Caine flirting. It was so bad, but it felt like “these losers are terrible at this,” not “the writer is terrible at this,” you know? (Probably because the actors tried their best.)

Here is what I thought could have been interesting:

• Kalique says that “time” is the only thing worth killing for. And she also says she sees Jupiter as a second chance with her mother.
• If you’ve watched enough of anything, you probably know that the number one cause of villainy is death of a loved one and the drive to revenge/necromancy.
• But here, Kalique is implying something very interesting - if you have enough time, you can meet the person you lost again, through recurrence. With time, you can overcome even death.

In fact, I feel that the movie would have seriously benefited from a tighter focus on the “family” theme. Jupiter’s birth family, the queen’s children, even Caine’s wish for a pack. If you tie it together - even clumsily - you would get a better story, I think.

(Other things that could have used more focus/clearer showing: The Aegis being totally Lawful. Man, they don’t care about Earth getting harvested, people being killed by the billion. They just want law to be followed. Jupiter initially trying to sell her eggs. Infinite regeneration, sure, but does that really restore all the eggs you ovulate over the course of a few decades? So how does fertility work in this case? Could have also been interesting. There’s genetic engineering on bees, okay, what else? That can’t the only species whole “genetic destiny” is preset when their distant ancestor species are created. What does that mean for Earth-humanity? Why did the queen care so much about Earth? Did she know her recurrence would be born there? Etc. Etc. Etc.)

Of course, what I couldn’t stand the most was the bad Russian. It was terrible.

• Jupiter is a masculine noun in Russian. (Naturally, it’s a male god.) It sounds super masculine. What was the mom thinking when she let her husband do this? There are plenty of female celestial bodies!
• At the very least, a Russian mom is not going to call her daughter by her full, awkward, totally masculine name. She’s be “Yusha,” I think. Or even the disgustingly cutesy “Yushen’ka.” My mom never calls me Anastasia. Ever. And that’s a real name at least.
• The main characters’ Russian accents were terrible. Also, the subtitles were mismatched. The random thugs in the beginning were saying, “Shut up!” but the subtitles have, “Where’s the money?”
• The extended family… felt a bit spot on, actually. The cousin was a lot like my mom’s second cousin, who’s always got some get rich quick scheme going. It made me a bit uncomfortable and annoyed. I don’t like real-life and fiction intersections in my B-movie no-thinking time.