To INSANITY and BEYOND!
The plot’s nonsense. The characters are ridiculous. But who cares? Jupiter Ascending is an intergalactic hoot!
Some science-fiction films are supposed to be taken seriously; pictures
such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris and Inception. And then there are others that hurtle about the known universe with no greater ambition than to be an all-round entertaining, sci-fi
hoot. I’m thinking about films like Flash Gordon, Guardians Of The Galaxy and, whisper it softly,
even Star Wars.
Jupiter Ascending, the new film from Lana and Andy Wachowski – makers of the Matrix movies – is definitely and gloriously in the entertaining category. It’s magnificent to look at, as you’d expect from these past masters of visual effects (remember bullet-time?), but it’s also wonderfully silly, very good fun and has its tongue splendidly in its cheek.
‘Really,’ asks our heroine, Jupiter Jones, about halfway through, ‘could this get any weirder?’ The Short answer, is, ‘Yes, Jupiter, it could,’ because just like Dorothy in The Wizard Of
Oz, she’s definitely not in Kansas any more.
The film that Jupiter Ascending most reminded me of – almost to the point of expecting Brian Blessed to suddenly appear shouting ‘Gordon’s alive!’ – is Flash Gordon. There it fell to a star football player to save Earth from the destructive attentions of Ming the Merciless. Here we slide even further down the social ladder to find Jupiter Jones, who, having grown up in Chicago as the daughter of an illegal Russian immigrant, is a humble cleaner, albeit, as played by Mila Kunis, rather a pretty one.
What she doesn’t know about cleaning toilet bowls isn’t worth knowing so it’s quite a surprise when we discover that all sorts of aliens are after her. First, little pink murderous ones; then some technically enhanced bounty-hunters; and finally a chap who says he’s part-human, part-wolf – he claims he used to have wings but now does his flying with the help of anti-gravity boots instead. Ah, that’ll be Caine, played with muscular relish by Channing Tatum.
But in a film that brings together talking lizards (English, naturally), golden spacecraft and the best anti-ageing product in the galaxy, it falls to a humble swarm of bees to reveal the film’s key plot point. Rather than sting her, the bees respectfully follow each sweep of Jupiter’s arms, prompting Stinger (a colleague of Caine, also muscular and once-winged, and played by Sean Bean) to drop to one knee: ‘Your Majesty,’ he intones solemnly.
Yes, it turns out – three words that hardly do justice to this magnificently over-thetop premise – that Jupiter is actually a genetic reincarnation, or ‘recurrence’ to use the jargon, of a woman who may not quite be queen of the universe, but was certainly the all-powerful matriarch of the planet-destroying House of Abrasax.
Her apparent rebirth, as Jupiter, is bad news for the three Abrasax siblings – Balem (Eddie Redmayne), Titus (Douglas Booth) and Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), locked in an intergalactic battle for control that might just spell the end of planet Earth.
That seems like a lot of plot, but it’s only about 10% of a story so over-elaborate that just trying to keep up becomes part of the fun. But there are other pleasures to be had too, as, along the way, we discover how the dinosaurs were wiped out (forget that meteor), how crop circles are made, and that ‘ portalling’ (think wormholes) can apparently be rough on the royal bowels.
Kunis and Tatum strike up a nice chemistry together, helped by banter that is as funny as it is flirtatious. ‘I have more in common with a dog than
I have with you,’ says Caine, explaining why her new royal status makes a relationship impossible. ‘But I love dogs,’ she replies, rather too quickly. Earth girls, it seems, are still easy.
Rarely can the ups and downs of an actor’s life be better demonstrated than by Redmayne’s presence. In real life, he’s hot favourite to win the Oscar for his stunning performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory Of Everything, yet here he is, playing the arch-baddie, apparently channelling the whispering Ralph Fiennes as Voldermort, and being very silly in the process.
But by and large the ensemble acting is pretty good here, with Middleton, in particular, lighting up every scene she is in. And do look out for a cameo from Terry Gilliam, playing an obfuscating bureaucrat, in a role that acknowledges the creative debt owed here to the likes of Time Bandits and
Brazil. The film does, however, run out of story, pace and tension in the last lap, with Booth, as the pleasure-pursuing Titus, not quite having the presence to keep us onside, and Kunis, who otherwise carries the film impressively, in distinct danger of being overwhelmed by the climatic visual effects.
But our enjoyment is only dampened a little. This is a film the Wachowskis have clearly enjoyed making, born out of technical prowess and their sheer love of science-fiction and fantasy, and it should be enjoyed in the same way.
Or, to put it another way, Jupiter Ascending is not a work of highbrow art… but it is an awful lot of mid-term fun.