Jupiter Ascending (Part 1 of 2)

 

Jupiter Ascending (Part 1 of 2)

Oh, boy, this movie is such an epic mess that it almost comes across as a parody of a big budget film . There are bad acting choices and poor story decisions that this movie makes you actually long for the days of Speed Racer and The Matrix Revolution. That's how bad this movie is. Given this is a fresh and new world, I wanted to like the movie, but the movie is just plain bad. The movie is a total mess with a major budget and never made its money back despite doing better overseas.

First off, the visuals are truly stunning. It honestly looks like a live action Anime movie. There are robots of all sorts and huge ships and strange aliens thrown in for good measure. The style of clothing is also pretty to marvel. There are some amazing things here they wanted to do in their earlier movies. However, wrapped up in a weak narrative and poor acting, it simply fails.

Overall, the characters and story are just weak.

It is like they fell into the same traps that Lucas did with his Star Wars prequels. All glitz and glitter without a strong story. Plus, The Wachowskis make some really stupid acting decisions. Just because you have this stunning world doesn't make your movie any good with some good acting. People have to care about the story and the characters first. You make that connection with the characters and grab them with a fun story. The visuals are the icing on the cake.

Perhaps giving the siblings so much creative power might be a bad thing?

So, the are a lot of good small ideas encased within a poorly conceived bigger plot. Like The Matrix, the bad guys are using humans to bring extended life to their bodies and harvesting the life force from living creatures is a hot commodity in the larger galaxy. Then, you have to understand that high born people own planets and that Mila Kutza is supposed to be the rightful owner of Earth due to the fact she is supposed to be high born herself. She reborn from a Queen of some type.

And, trust me, it gets a lot sillier when you add the religious bullshit they try to shoehorn in to with connections to science and DNA. It felt natural in the first two Matrix movies. In Jupiter, it feels really, really forced. Did we really need the faith argument brought up again?

After watching this movie, it is quite clear The Wachowskis have lost touch with how to tell a proper movie narrative. Like Lucas, they sort of box themselves away from the outside world and seem to only take in Anime influences. Stories have to make sense within the word the set in, but time and time again glaring plot-holes make this movie difficult to sit through.

One of the biggest ones has to do with aliens “blanking” human minds. On a personal level, skinny aliens wiping away portions of people's memories works. On a huge scale, not so much. Yet, there is a huge battle that happens in a major city where buildings, subway cars and regular cars explode or get turned over. At one point, clearly some people died in the battle. Yet, Channing Tatum 's character explains that everything will be rebuilt by the next day and the population's memories will be wiped. Uh, what about the people that clearly died throughout the city? They're dead. Won't someone miss them?

Why not just leave the city in shambles and have the population question the alien issue. Why add the element of massive rebuilding and memory loss without addressing the death issue. You're just digging yourself a plot-hole.

And, there are many other holes to.

At one point, Channing's character is blown out of an airlock, so they can kill him. The people is they also blow out fast-sealing space suits out of the same airlock. So, Channing, withing seconds, can place a protective space suit around him before he dies. Why leave those things in the airlock? Did you want him to live?

The other thing is they try to jam pack all this back story into the movie about family history and other things. You can get away with it in a series like Game of Thrones because you have hour upon hours to explain it away. Not in a 2-plus hour movie. I found myself bored with the history of the royal families because we simply don't have the time to flesh it out.