The Wachowskis’ latest epic is a better antimaterialist fable than a space opera. Capture, rescue, repeat. WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW.
Mila Kunis as Jupiter Jones in Jupiter Ascending
Warner Bros.
Jupiter Ascending is not a very good sci-fi movie.
It's just not. It has a heroine and hero, Jupiter Jones and Caine Wise, who are archetypes instead of characters — the royal in need of rescue and the impossibly capable warrior who is always poised to help her out with that. And the actors playing them, Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum, rarely get comfortable working in a stylized mode that requires them to talk about skyjackers and differential equation boots and fall in love in the beats between outsize action sequences.
Kunis and Tatum can't get on the same wavelength as fellow cast members like the mouse-ear-sporting Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the crusty Sean Bean, or Eddie Freakin' Redmayne, none of whom seem to share their trouble surrendering to Andy and Lana Wachowski's "go big or go home" vision. Jupiter Ascending does some gorgeous, expansive world-building, but the only way it can navigate the baroque cosmic empire it introduces is via a cycle of capture, rescue, repeat involving its two uncertain leads.
It's not a good sci-fi movie. But it is a good, sometimes even great, reworked fairy tale, a Cinderella story in which the servant girl gets swept away to the palace, only to realize that life as a princess is awful and not worth the trouble. The Wachowskis have marshaled a sprawling, intensely detailed old-school space opera universe, all to tell an ultimately simple story about appreciating what you have, with an antimaterialist bent that feels particularly perverse and daring coming from a $175 million studio effort.
The sibling directors have crafted a story that's a rebuttal to the classic trope in which someone finds out they've always secretly been the most important person in some magical other world they never knew about. Courtesy of her genetic code, Jupiter goes from unhappy housecleaner to intergalactic heiress, and being bequeathed with multiple planets turns out to be much worse than scrubbing toilets.
Channing Tatum in Jupiter Ascending
Warner Bros.
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