If cool
concepts and visually stunning effects alone were the stuff that great movies
are made of, Jupiter Ascending would
have been a smash hit. Unfortunately, a film needs more than that. It needs
plot, good acting and character development. More than anything, it needs good
writing. Jupiter Ascending has none
of those things. The sad truth is, the Wachowski siblings may never make
another movie that was as conceptually moving and as well thought out as the Matrix trilogy. And when I come to think
of it, I’m the only person I know who thoroughly enjoyed all three Matrix movies.
As soon as I found out the main
character’s name was Jupiter, I knew I was in for a flop. It had all the
telltale signs: the characters were two-dimensional, the lines were spoken as
if they were being read off of a teleprompter, and there was nothing
particularly redeeming about the main character’s willingness to take abuse and
be manipulated at every turn.
It seemed like the Wachowskis were attempting to set us up
for some sort of intergalactic Cinderella motif where the prince is the
villain. And boy what a villain. His voice was constantly at a whining whisper
so that it seemed like he was always about to cry and or make out with the
other characters on screen. Not that the other villains were any better, though
their underacting didn’t exactly excuse or compensate for the main villain’s overacting.
Still, I don’t blame the actors. It’s the director’s responsibility to keep
this type of stuff from making it to the final cut, and I’m one-hundred percent
sure it was the Wachowskis who saw to it that Eddie Redmayne came across as a
hackneyed S&M dungeon master.
I almost want to say that there were gaping plot holes, but
there was no plot to speak of, other than that Jupiter was apparently ascending.
What I can say is there were glaring inconsistencies in the conceptualization
of the alternative reality of the movie. One scene in particular that comes to
mind is where a space ship glides through the rings of a planet as though
it were a submarine coming to surface. We know that this was in the name of
keeping the movie visually stunning, but it was pretty arbitrary considering
that the ship had the entire rest of space to choose to move through and that
the meteorites that comprise the rings of a planet will destroy pretty much
anything in their path. Other issues that were ignored were little things like
when and where atmosphere occurs and who is immune to the vacuum of space.
If anything could have saved the film, it might have been the
awesome concepts that were thrown around, all of which were dismissed almost as
soon as they were introduced. These cool concepts included: youth as a drug,
time as a tradable commodity, the farming and harvesting of various humanoid
species, an intergalactic monarchy, and a scientific paradigm explaining the
concept of reincarnation.
With the most interesting parts of the movie remaining
largely undeveloped, there was never a payoff. If there was any takeaway at
all, it was that nobody screws you over quite like family. The film as a whole
was like a sci-fi turret and probably would have been better delivered as a
trilogy or an HBO series. Unfortunately the Wachowskis prematurely ejaculated
their ideas all over the screen and won’t be getting a second chance to bed us
down with them in the near future.
No comments:
Post a Comment